Hamlet in Purgatory (Expanded Edition) - Webcourses@UCF

H A M LE T I N P U RG AT O RY

S T EP H EN G R EEN B L AT T

Hamlet in

Purgatory

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P R I N C E T O N U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S

P R I N C E T O N A N D OX F O R D

With a new prefaceby the author

Copyright © 2001 by Princeton University PressPreface copyright © 2013 by Princeton University Press

Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street,Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

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All Rights Reserved

First printing, 2001First paperback printing, 2002

First Princeton Classics edition, 2013

Library of Congress Control Number 2013937134ISBN 978-0-691-16024-5

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Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

Printed in the United States of America

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For Ramie

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L I S T O F I L L U S T R AT I O N S

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A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

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P R O L O G U E

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C H A P T E R O N E

A Poet’s Fable10

C H A P T E R T W O

Imagining Purgatory47

C H A P T E R T H R E E

The Rights of Memory102

C H A P T E R F O U R

Staging Ghosts151

C H A P T E R F I V E

Remember Me205

E P I L O G U E

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N O T E S

263

I N D E X

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P R E FA C E

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L I S T O F I L L U S T R AT I O N S

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A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

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P R O L O G U E

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C H A P T E R O N E

A Poet’s Fable10

C H A P T E R T W O

Imagining Purgatory47

C H A P T E R T H R E E

The Rights of Memory102

C H A P T E R F O U R

Staging Ghosts151

C H A P T E R F I V E

Remember Me205

E P I L O G U E

258

N O T E S

263

I N D E X

315

GreenblattPC.indd 5 7/12/13 10:35 AM

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PLATES

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1. Initial D. Peasant (Adam?) digging above scenes of Purgatory and Hell.Hugo Ripelin von Straßburg, “Compendium theologicae veritatis,” Book3, fol. 64va. Wurzburg, Universitatsbibliothek, Cod. M. ch. F. 690.

2. Souls ascending. Gerart David of Bruges in Book of Hours belonging toEdward, Lord Hastings. Brit. Lib., Add. MS 54,782, fol. 231. By permis-sion of the British Library.

3. Angel protecting soul from demon. Book of Hours that belonged to Philipthe Fair, archduke of Austria. Brit. Lib. Add. MSS 17,280, fol. 281. Bypermission of the British Library.

4. Hieronymus Bosch, Vision of the Otherworld. Palazzo Ducale, Venice. Bypermission of Art Resource.

5. Tondal suffers a seizure. Simon Marmion (illuminator), Les Visions du che-valier Tondal (1475), fol. 7. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

6. The beast Acheron, devourer of the avaricious. Simon Marmion (illumina-tor), Les Visions du chevalier Tondal (1475), fol. 17. The J. Paul Getty Mu-seum, Los Angeles.

7. The Wicked But Not Very. Simon Marmion (illuminator), Les Visions duchevalier Tondal (1475), fol. 33v. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

8. The Monk and Guy’s widow converse with the soul of Guy de Thurno.Simon Marmion (illuminator), The Vision of the Soul of Guy de Thurno(1474), fol. 7. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

FIGURES

1. “40 days of indulgence” Votive plaque beneath image of Virgin,Erice, Sicily. Photo: Stephen Greenblatt. 15

2. Funeral. Gerart David of Bruges in Book of Hours belonging toEdward, Lord Hastings. Brit. Lib., Add. MS 54,782, fol. 184. Bypermission of the British Library. 53

3. Souls in Hell. Book of Hours belonging to Philip the Fair,archduke of Austria. Brit. Lib. Add. MSS 17,280, fol. 38. Bypermission of the British Library. 54

x I L LU ST RA T I O N S

4. Rescue from Purgatory. French Book of Hours (Horae B. MariaeVirginis). Brit. Lib. Add. MS 11,866. By permission of the Brit-ish Library. 55

5. Gregory conducting Mass. Note soul climbing out of cauldron.Brit. Lib. Add MS 18193: Hores de Nra Senyora Segons laEsglesia Romana. By permission of British Library. 56

6. Soul in purgatorial flames. Church in Ragusa, Sicily. Photo:Stephen Greenblatt. 57

7. Christ and Mary nourishing souls in Purgatory with blood andmilk. Hans Holbein the Younger,Missale Speciale (Basel: ThomasWolff, Marz 1521). By permission of the Houghton Library,Harvard University. 58

8. Tondal and Guardian Angel. Simon Marmion (illuminator), LesVisions du chevalier Tondal (1475), fol. 11v. The J. Paul GettyMuseum, Los Angeles. 63

9. The Good But Not Totally Good. Simon Marmion (illuminator),Les Visions du chevalier Tondal (1475), fol. 34v. The J. Paul GettyMuseum, Los Angeles. 64

10. Magic Lantern. Athanasius Kircher, Romani Collegii Societatus JesuMusaeum celeberrimum (1678), p. 125. By permission of theHoughton Library, Harvard University. 92

A C K N OW L E D G M E N T S

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AS IS APPROPRIATE for a book about Purgatory, I have benefitedgreatly from the kindness of loved ones, friends, and strangers. Ihave deep debts of gratitude to both institutions and individualswho have helped me bring this project to completion. An invita-tion to deliver the University Lectures at Princeton University pro-vided me with the key incentive to work out my ideas, and I re-ceived helpful criticism, suggestions, and encouragement frommany friends there, including Oliver Arnold, Lawrence Danson,Anthony Grafton, Alvin Kernan, and Froma Zeitlin. A year at themarvelous Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin was invaluable. The Rek-tor, Prof. Dr. Wolf Lepenies, the superb staff, and the intense intel-lectual stimulation of the Kolleg created an ideal space for re-search and writing—and the fact that Berlin is haunted by ghostswas itself a powerful inducement to reflect on the claims of thedead and the obligations of the living. I have been fortunate inother institutional supports as well, including the extraordinaryresources of the British Library, the Getty Library in Los Angeles,and the Houghton and Widener Libraries at Harvard University.The intellectual seriousness and high distinction of my colleaguesand students at Harvard have been equally remarkable resources.A residence at the Rockefeller Foundation Study and ConferenceCenter in Bellagio and a Corrour Symposium enabled me to thinkand write in almost absurdly beautiful surroundings.Now, as in the past, I have been struck by the remarkable intel-

lectual generosity of scholars. I have had the opportunity to pre-sent pieces of this book as lectures, and on each and every one ofthese occasions I have profited greatly from advice and argument,often pursued in subsequent e-mail exchanges. I particularly wantto thank the Medical Anthropology and Cultural Psychiatry Re-

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search Seminar at Harvard University; the Seminar on Society, Be-lief, and Culture in the Early Modern World at the University ofLondon; the Center for Research in Early Modern History, Cul-ture, and Science at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universistat inFrankfurt; the conference on “Rituale Heute” at the University ofZurich; the conference on “Lancastrian Shakespeare” at LancasterUniversity; the New Europe College in Bucharest, Romania; theCenter for Literary Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem;Kyoto University, Tokyo University, and the Suntory Foundationin Japan; and the Indian Institute of Technology and the IndianAcademy of Letters in New Delhi.The list of individuals who have helped me could be extended

for many pages, but I will content myself with naming a few whoseassistance with this book has been particularly important to me:Homi Bhabha, Natalie ZemonDavis, Philip Fisher, Carlo Ginzberg,Valentin Groebner, Richard Helgerson, David Kastan, JeffreyKnapp, Joseph Koerner, Lisbet Koerner, Thomas Laqueur, Fran-cois Laroque, FrancoMarenco, J. Hillis Miller, Robert Pinsky, PeterSacks, Elaine Scarry, Pippa Skotnes, Nicholas Watson, and BernardWilliams. Debora Shuger brought to the whole manuscript hercharacteristic spiritual intensity, rich learning, and penetrating in-telligence. JohnMaier and Gustavo Secchi have been indefatigableand resourceful research assistants; Beatrice Kitzinger and JohnLopez made many valuable suggestions. As always, my sons, Joshand Aaron, have listened patiently, asked crucial questions, andprodded me in new directions. It seems appropriate too, given mysubject, to reflect with gratitude on all I owe to my father, who diedin 1983, and to my mother, who died—it pains me to write—justas I was finishing this book.I have left for last my acknowledgment of the deepest bond, the

most cherished indebtedness, to the person who has been essentialin every way to meeting the challenges and sharing the pleasuresof this project: my wife, Ramie Targoff.

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Around 1600, audiences in London flocked to the Globe Theatre to see a new dramatization of a very old story, a tale of murder and revenge in medieval Denmark. Since the tale of Hamlet had already been adapted at least once before for the London stage in a play per-formed successfully in the 1590s, the rough outlines of the plot may have been familiar to many who bought tickets to see Shakespeare’s new version. But what they saw at the Globe was an unprecedented explosion of theatrical power.

That power was vividly in evidence from the play’s initial words, “Who’s there?”—the most famous opening line in theater history—to the cannon-fire with which it closes. The sense that something re-markable had happened seems to have led to a heightened desire to read the tragedy’s script. A pirated version went on sale almost immediately, and an authorized text (“Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much againe as it was, according to the true and perfect Coppie”) appeared soon after. The play has never fallen out of favor; it remains almost eerily alive.

I set out in Hamlet in Purgatory to understand some of the sources of Hamlet’s power. What enabled Shakespeare to infuse so much life into his characters and why should this life seem peculiarly present where we would least expect it, in the figure of a dead man, the ghost of the murdered king? What resources did he draw upon to make the old story so fresh and so gripping? Or, as I put it to myself, into what cultural artery did he plunge his needle in order to release the star-tling rush of vital energy?

In undertaking the project, I did not want to put this energy back where it came from—as if that were possible—or to explain it away. I wanted to dwell in a particular literary pleasure, to heighten its won-der by burrowing down into the historical materials out of which it was produced. Those materials, I tried to show, reached deep into

PREFACE

xiv PREFACE

Renaissance English culture, into its characteristic ways of burying the dead, imagining the afterlife, negotiating with memories of the departed. The risk was that the play would disappear into the details of that culture, as in a sterile antiquarianism. But my hope was that I could instead disclose the resources upon which the playwright drew and thereby extend the field of imaginative power.

The imagination is not the exclusive possession of experts; rather, the experts—great writers and artists—are singularly gifted at tapping into what is circulating all around them in virtually everyone, high and low. Some are gifted as well at drawing upon what has ceased to circulate, what was once alive but now lies buried beneath the cultural soil. Shakespeare, it seemed to me, had a particular interest in dig-ging up and redeploying damaged or discarded institutional goods, cultural memories that he returned to his contemporaries and be-queathed to the future.

At the University of California, Berkeley, where I taught for many happy years, I conducted several graduate seminars on the topic of memory in Renaissance literature. Hamlet, virtually obsessed with memory, figured prominently among our texts, and it was in this con-nection that I began to read and teach some of the highly charged and revealing accounts from the Middle Ages and Renaissance of ghosts returning to haunt the living. Shakespeare may have directly encoun-tered one or another of these accounts, but my principal interest in my seminar was not in source study. Rather I wanted to explore these texts in order to excavate a set of popular beliefs, practices, fears, and hopes upon which Hamlet drew, fantasies that Shakespeare could have encountered in a multitude of ways no longer accessible to us.

When in the course of writing Hamlet in Purgatory, I found myself engaged in an attempt to understand the bitter quarrel over the “mid-dle state of souls” and increasingly fascinated by the Vision of Tondal, the Owayne Miles, the Gast of Gy, and the Supplication of Souls, I did not therefore succumb to a fear that I was losing the proper liter-ary focus. I felt instead that I was tapping into what I once termed “the circulation of social energy.” It is a mistake, I believe, to try to set certain prized works of art—and Hamlet, of course, is one of the most prized—in a special category by themselves, apart from this cir-culation and uncontaminated by it. Our efforts instead should go

PREFACE xv

precisely in the opposite direction, toward an understanding of the hidden exchanges that confer on those works their special and endur-ing resonance.

This resonance, I try to show in Hamlet in Purgatory, is linked to a cult of the dead—to competing religious institutions that once at-tempted to regulate and profit from this cult and to competing cul-tural institutions that embarked on a similar attempt. Preeminent among those cultural institutions in the early seventeenth century was the theater, to which Shakespeare gave so much of his life. That is, in what he wrote for the theater he not only drew upon the traces be-queathed him from the past, but he also conferred upon those traces his own vital agency. Something of Shakespeare’s life, along with the lives of many others who preceded him, survives in Hamlet. It has been handed down through innumerable texts and performances; it is passing through the present moment in which I am writing; and it is poised to enter an unknown future. In this sense, Hamlet in Purgatory is itself a ghost story.

Stephen GreenblattApril 2013

H A M LE T I N P U RG AT O RY

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THIS IS a book about the afterlife of Purgatory, the echoes of itsdead name. Specifically, it is about the traces of Purgatory inHamlet(1601). Thus described, my project seems very tightly focused, butsince Purgatory was a creation of Western Christendom as a whole,I found I could not neatly restrict my account, geographically orculturally: Ireland plays an important role, as do France, Italy,and Germany. But my principal concern is with England; to under-stand what Shakespeare inherited and transformed, we need tounderstand the way in which Purgatory, the middle space of therealm of the dead, was conceived in English texts of the later Mid-dle Ages and then attacked by English Protestants of the sixteenthand early seventeenth centuries. That attack, as we will see, focusedon the imagination: Purgatory, it was charged, was not simply afraud; it was a piece of poetry. The terms of this attack in turn, Iwill argue, facilitated Shakespeare’s crucial appropriation of Pur-gatory in Hamlet.As such sketches often do, this one reverses the order in which

this book actually evolved. I began with the notion of writing abook about Shakespeare as a Renaissance conjurer. By the term“conjurer” I simply mean someone who has the power to call forthor make contact through language with those things—voices,faces, bodies, and spirits—that are absent. Shakespeare possessedthis power to an extraordinary degree, and I wanted to exploresome of its sources. I made starts in several different directions: anessay onMacbeth and Shakespeare’s great contemporary, ReginaldScot, who blamed witchcraft persecutions on a misplaced faith inpoets’ metaphors; an essay on the peculiar absence in Shake-speare’s drama, even in a play like King Lear about extreme oldage, of what we would term “natural death”; several essays on

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Shakespeare’s theatrical appropriation of the Eucharist.1 Aboveall, I found myself drawn again and again to the weird, compellingghost in Hamlet, and I set aside the overarching project to concen-trate on that single figure.My goal was not to understand the theology behind the ghost;

still less, to determine whether it was “Catholic” or “Protestant.”My only goal was to immerse myself in the tragedy’s magical inten-sity. It seems a bit absurd to bear witness to the intensity of Hamlet;but my profession has become so oddly diffident and even phobicabout literary power, so suspicious and tense, that it risks losingsight of—or at least failing to articulate—the whole reason anyonebothers with the enterprise in the first place. The ghost in Hamletis like none other—not only in Shakespeare but in any literary orhistorical text that I have ever read. It does not have very manylines—it appears in three scenes and speaks only in two—but it isamazingly disturbing and vivid. I wanted to let the feeling of thisvividness wash over me, and I wanted to understand how it wasachieved.I believe that nothing comes of nothing, even in Shakespeare. I

wanted to know where he got the matter he was working with andwhat he did with that matter. And so the broad inquiry that hadcome to focus more and more sharply on one figure in a singleplay spread out once again to encompass a dauntingly large field.Many of the key features of this field—the “poetics” of Purgatoryin England and the struggle over its existence—do not align them-selves conveniently with elements in Hamlet or in any of Shake-speare’s plays. For example, Prince Hamlet does not worry that he,like his father, may serve a prison term in Purgatory (though hedoes worry that his soul might go to Hell), and Shakespeare neverin his career seems drawn to the argument that ghost stories werecynical devices wielded by wolvish priests to extract wealth fromthe gullible. But I believe strongly that the historical and contex-tual work that literary critics do succeeds only if it acquires its owncompelling imaginative interest, a powerful gravitational pull thatmakes it feel almost wrenching to turn back to the thing that wasthe original focus of interest. And paradoxically it is this indepen-dent interest—the fascination that I at least have found in Saint

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Patrick’s Purgatory and The Gast of Gy and the Supplication of Souls,along with trentals, indulgences, chantries, and requiem masses—that makes the whole subject seem worthy of Hamlet.For even when in the course of this book I seem to be venturing

far away from Hamlet, the play shapes virtually everything I have tosay. This is in part because Hamlet has made so central a contribu-tion to what Joel Fineman calls “the subjectivity effect” in Westernconsciousness that it has helped to condition the sensibilities of itsreaders and auditors.2 In part, too, it is because my interest in whatyears ago I called a cultural poetics, adapting the term from Clif-ford Geertz, requires a certain hermeneutical patience, a willing-ness to suspend direct literary analysis, in order to examine morethoroughly what had been treated as mere background for thecanonical work of art. If we are in part the unintended conse-quences of Hamlet, Shakespeare’s play, I will suggest, is in partone of the unintended consequences of the theological struggleswith which much of this book will be concerned. But for this bookto work properly, the reader should understand literary analysis,and specifically the analysis of Hamlet, to be suspended in anothersense as well, that is, distributed in tiny, almost invisible particlesthroughout my account.

A FEW years ago, as a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, Ihad a conversation with an urbane Islamicist who was maintainingeloquently that one must put aside one’s family and group identi-fications, no matter how powerful they may be, in order to thinkand speak as a rational person. I agreed with him, but I foundmyself thinking, and not for the first time, how slyly amusing andacute Plato was in the Ion in pointing to the tension between thework of the rational philosopher and the work of the rhapsode or,let us say, the literary critic. I know, in any case, that I am incapableof simply bracketing my own origins; rather, I find myself trying totransform them, most often silently and implicitly, into the love Ibring to my work.Let me on this occasion be explicit. My father was born in the

late nineteenth century. I was the child of what I used to think ofas his old age but that I have now, at my point in life, come to think

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of, rather, as his vigorous middle age. I saw him, in any case, asembodying the life experience not of the generation directly be-hind me but of two generations back. His own childhood memo-ries seemed to have a quite unusual, almost eerie distance frommy life-world. Hence, for example, he told me that when he wasvery young, he was taken, along with the other boys in his Hebrewschool class (his cheder) to the apartment of a Jewish railway workerwho had been struck and killed by a train. The little children weretold by their teacher, whom I can only imagine as a madman, tostand around the mangled corpse—which was placed on greatcakes of ice, since it was the summer in Boston and very hot—andto recite the psalms, while the man’s wife wailed inconsolably in acorner.Initiated, perhaps, by this traumatic experience, my father was

obsessed throughout his life with death. His own father had dieddreadfully, clinging to his son and begging for help, and my fathercarried the scars of that experience with him ever after. The effecton him was not exactly melancholy, but rather something like astrange blend of wonder and denial. The wonder had a specificorigin: my grandfather had died in New York, where my father hadtaken him in a desperate, last-ditch search for medical treatment.My father then had to bring the body back to Boston by train. Thecoffin was in the baggage car, and my father was sitting quietlyweeping in the club car, when, in New Haven, Connecticut, theentire chorus line of the Ziegfield Follies climbed on board. Thechorus girls, leggy, buxom, bejeweled, bedecked in feather boasand wide-brimmed hats, sweetly crowded around my weeping fa-ther, kissing and hugging him and trying to cheer him up. It wasperhaps my father’s purest encounter with the wonderful powerof eros over thanatos.To this experience of wonder my father conjoined denial. He

kept us from celebrating his birthday, refused to retire, workinguntil the week before he died in his eighty-seventh year, and liedabout his age even when he entered the hospital. But when weread his will, we found that he had, after all, been thinking abouthis death. He had left a sum of money to an organization thatwould say kaddish for him—kaddish being the Aramaic prayer for

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the dead, recited for eleven months after a person’s death andthen on certain annual occasions. The prayer is usually said bythe deceased’s immediate family and particularly by his sons—inYiddish a son could actually be called a kaddish, so that a childlessman could be said to die without leaving a kaddish. Evidently, myfather did not trust either my older brother or me to recite theprayer for him. The effect the bequest had on me, perhaps per-versely, was to impel me to do so, as if in a blend of love and spite.I did not until that moment know that Jews had anything like

chantries, and I realized that I did not know why Jews prayed forthe dead at all. After all, biblical Judaism has only what seems likea vague and imaginatively impoverished account of the afterlife.The Hebrew Bible speaks of a place called sheol, often translatedby Christians as “Hell,” but it is not a place of torture and hasvery few of the features of the Christian or classical underworld.3

It seems to be associated not with torment (or purgation) butrather with privation or depression. “Are not my days few?” com-plains Job; “cease then, and let me alone, that I may take comforta little, Before I go whence I shall not return, even to the land ofdarkness and the shadow of death; A land of darkness, as darknessitself; and of the shadow of death, without any order, and wherethe light is as darkness” (Job 10:20–22). The phrase “without anyorder” links this netherworld not with a prison house or penalcolony—we are immensely distant conceptually from Dante’s cir-cles—but with the state of things before the Creation, when “theearth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the faceof the deep” (Gen. 1:2). The overall focus in the Hebrew Scrip-tures is not on assuring oneself a more favorable location in thismelancholy kingdom, but rather on valuing life: “For him that isjoined to all the living there is hope,” as Ecclesiastes puts it, “for aliving dog is better than a dead lion” (9:4).There are, however, some biblical expressions, especially in the

Psalter, of a hope to be liberated from sheol: “Like sheep they arelaid in the grave; death shall feed on them; and the upright shallhave dominion over them in the morning; and their beauty shallconsume in the grave from their dwelling. But God will redeemmy soul from the power of the grave: for he shall receiveme. Selah”

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(Ps. 49:14–15). Or again, “For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell;neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption. Thouwilt shew me the path of life: in thy presence is fullness of joy; atthy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16:10–11).This faith in the possibility of resurrection—and the Jewish liturgyto this day praises God for raising the dead to life—still does notexplain why Jews would offer prayers for the dead.The answer seems to be that the kaddish, as we know it, is rela-

tively recent. In a sermon preached at St. Paul’s on May 21, 1626,John Donne notes that God gave his chosen people, throughMoses and Aaron, the most elaborate directions for every aspectof their lives: “what they should eat, what they should wear, howoften they should wash, what they should do, in every religious, inevery civil action.” Yet, Donne continues, “never, never any men-tion, any intimation, never any approach, any inclination, neverany light, no nor any shadow, never any color, any colorablenessof any command of prayer for the Dead.” There was, to be sure,an ancient custom of remembering the dead, on Yom Kippur, aspart of the general ritual of atonement, and there was also a long-standing Hebrew custom of giving alms to the poor or to charitableinstitutions in memory of the dead. But the Jews adopted prayersfor the dead, Donne argues, from the pagans: “After the Jews hadbeen a long time conversant amongst the Gentiles, and that asfresh water approaching the Sea, contracts a saltish, a brackishtaste, so the Jews received impressions of the customs of the Gen-tiles, who were ever naturally inclined to this mis-devotion, andleft-handed piety, of praying for the Dead.”4

In fact, though the left-handed piety of the pagans may be theultimate origin of praying for the dead, the Jews may well haveadopted it from the Christians. The recitation of the mourner’skaddish seems to have originated in the Rhineland in the twelfthcentury, after the horrors of the First and Second Crusade. In thewake of the mass murders and suicides, the Ashkenazim evidentlybegan to keep memorial books,Memorbucher, in which the martyrs,along with benefactors of the community and other worthies, werecommemorated. The inscriptions in these books were linked to

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the kaddish, and, eventually, the recitation of this prayer was gener-alized to include all of the dead.In a recent, often haunting meditation on the kaddish, Leon

Wieseltier acknowledges that the recitation of the mourner’s kad-dish thus originated precisely at the time that Christianity in theWest formalized the practice of praying for the dead in order toalleviate their sufferings in Purgatory. “Yet this is, as I say, a coinci-dence,” Wieseltier insists; “I do not believe for a minute that theone was the cause of the other.”5 It is not my intention to disputethis flat claim, nor do I have the scholarship to do so, but if it werea coincidence, it would be an almost miraculous one, since manyof the texts that Wieseltier cites bear a startling resemblance tothe exempla and scholastic arguments of the medieval and earlymodern Christians among whom the Jews were dwelling. I suspect,rather, that the long, twisting path that leads back from my fatherand forefathers passes through the Christianity that seemed tothem the embodiment of otherness.6

Very few Jews were dwelling among the Christians in early mod-ern England; the entire community had been officially expelled in1290.7 But Donne speaks as if he has personally witnessed themsaying the kaddish: “This is true which I have seen,” he tells hisLondon congregation, “that the Jews at this day continue it in prac-tice; For when one dies, for some certain time after, appointed bythem, his son or some other near in blood or alliance, comes tothe Altar, and there saith and doth something in the behalf of hisdead father, or grandfather respectively.”8

This practice, then, which with a lightly ironic piety I, whoscarcely know how to pray, undertook for my own father, is thepersonal starting point for what follows.

) 1 (

A POET’S FABLE

EARLY IN 1529 a London lawyer, Simon Fish, anonymously pub-lished a tract, addressed to Henry VIII, called A Supplication for theBeggars. The tract was modest in length but explosive in content:Fish wrote on behalf of the homeless, desperate English men andwomen, “needy, impotent, blind, lame and sick” who pleaded forspare change on the streets of every city and town in the realm.1

These wretches, “on whom scarcely for horror any eye dare look,”have become so numerous that private charity can no longer sus-tain them, and they are dying of hunger.2 Their plight, in Fish’saccount, is directly linked to the pestiferous spread throughoutthe realm of beggars of a different kind: bishops, abbots, priors,deacons, archdeacons, suffragans, priests, monks, canons, friars,pardoners, and summoners.

Simon Fish had already given a foretaste of his anticlerical senti-ments and his satirical gifts. In his first year as a law student atGray’s Inn, according to John Foxe, one of Fish’s mates, a certainMr. Roo, had written a play holding Cardinal Wolsey up to ridicule.No one dared to take on the part of Wolsey until Simon Fish cameforward and offered to do so. The performance must have beenimpressive: it so enraged the cardinal that Fish was forced “thesame night that this Tragedy was played” to flee to the Low Coun-tries to escape arrest.3 There he evidently met the exile WilliamTyndale, whose new English translation of the Bible, inspired byLuther, he subsequently helped to circulate. At the time he wroteA Supplication for the Beggars, Fish had probably returned to London

11A P O ET ’ S FA B L E

but was in hiding. He was thus a man associated with Protestantbeliefs, determined to risk his life to save the soul of his country,and endowed, as were many religious revolutionaries in the 1520sand 1530s, with a kind of theatrical gift.4

In A Supplication for the Beggars, this gift leads Fish not only tospeak on behalf of the poor but also to speak in their own voice,crying out to the king against those who have greedily taken forthemselves the wealth that should otherwise have made Englandprosperous for all of its people. If his gracious majesty would onlylook around, he would see “a thing far out of joint” (413). Theravenous monkish idlers “have begged so importunately that theyhave gotten into their hands more then the third part of all yourRealm.” No great people, not the Greeks nor the Romans nor theTurks, and no ruler, not King Arthur himself, could flourish withsuch parasites sucking at their lifeblood. Not only do they destroythe economy, interfere with royal prerogative, and undermine thelaws of the commonwealth, but, since they seduce “every man’swife, every man’s daughter and every man’s maid,” they subvertthe nation’s moral order as well. Boasting among themselves aboutthe number of women they have slept with, the clerical dronescarry physical and moral contagion—syphilis, leprosy, and idle-ness—through the whole commonwealth. “Who is she that will sether hands to work to get three pence a day,” the beggars ask, “andmay have at least twenty pence a day to sleep an hour with a friar,a monk, or a priest?” (417). With a politician’s flair for shocking(and unverifiable) statistics, Fish estimates the number of En-glishwomen corrupted by monks at 100,000. No one can be sure,he writes, that it is his own child and not a priest’s bastard who ispoised to inherit his estate.

Why have these diseased “bloodsuppers” succeeded in amassingso much wealth and power? Why would otherwise sensible, decentpeople, alert to threats to their property, their health, and theirliberties, allow themselves to be ruthlessly exploited by a pack of“sturdy idle holy thieves” (415)? The question would be relativelyeasy to answer were this a cunningly concealed crime or one perpe-trated on the powerless. But in Fish’s account virtually the entiresociety, from the king and the nobility to the poor housewife who

12 C H A P T ER O N E

has to give the priests every tenth egg her hen lays, has been openlyvictimized. How is it possible to explain the dismaying spectacle ofwhat Montaigne’s friend, Etienne de la Boetie, called “voluntaryservitude”?5

For la Boetie (1530–1563) the answer is structural: a chain ofclientage and dependency extends and expands geometrically, heargues, from a small number of cynical exploiters at the top to thegreat mass of the exploited below.6 Anyone who challenges thissystem risks attack, both from the few who are actually reaping abenefit and from the many who are deceived into thinking thattheir interests are being served. Individuals may actually grasp thatthey have been lured into voluntary servitude, but as long as theyhave no way of knowing who else among them has arrived at thesame perception, they recognize that it is dangerous to speak out.

If those who see through the lies could share their knowledgewith other, like-minded souls, as they long to do, they could takethe steps necessary to free themselves from their chains. Thosesteps are remarkably simple: what is needed, in fact, is not a violentuprising but a quiet refusal. Since only a minuscule fraction of thesociety is truly profiting from the system, all it would take, werethere widespread enlightenment, is peaceful noncooperation.When the king demands his breakfast, one need only refuse tobring it. He may sputter in rage, but the rage will be as inconse-quential as an infant’s, provided that the great majority of menand women have collectively determined to be free. But how isthat determination to be fostered? How is it possible for those whounderstand the situation to awaken others, so that all can act inunison? As long as they remain isolated, there is little that enlight-ened individuals can do, and it is risky for them to open their secretthoughts to others. If only there were little windows in each person,la Boetie daydreams, so that one could see what is hidden insideand know to whom one could safely speak.

For Etienne de la Boetie, the first and fundamental problem isto account for widespread behavior that seems so obviously againstinterest, and not simply against the marginal or incidental con-cerns of particular groups but against the central material and sex-ual preoccupations of all human societies. Why do people allow


themselves to be robbed and cheated? Simon Fish is grappling withthe same problem, but his answer centers not on social structuresor institutions or hierarchical systems of dependency. After all, veryfew people think of themselves as actually dependent on the lazy,syphilitic monks and friars who shamelessly take advantage ofthem. These so-called holy men are not conspicuous figures ofwealth or might; on the contrary, unarmed and unattended, theydress poorly and go about begging. In Fish’s account their placeat the center of a vast system of pillaging and sexual corruptionrelies upon the exploitation of a single core conviction: Purgatory.

ALMS FOR THE DEAD

Fish was not alone in his theory. Elsewhere in the writings of theearly Reformers, we find similar claims for the overwhelming im-portance of the doctrine of Purgatory, a doctrine already longunder attack in England by those heretics known as Lollards.7 “InGod’s name, tell me,” the king asks the impoverished Commonal-ity in the tragedy King Johan by John Bale (1495–1563), “how com-eth thy substance gone?” To which Commonality replies, “Bypriests, canons and monks, which do but fill their belly, / Withmy sweat and labor for their popish Purgatory.”8 Tyndale similarlywrites of the churchmen that “[a]ll they have, they have receivedin the name of Purgatory . . . and on that foundation be all theirbishoprics, abbeys, colleges, and cathedral churches built.”9

The claim obviously serves a Protestant polemical purpose byloading the immense weight of the entire Catholic Church uponone of its most contested doctrines, but in the heated debates ofthe sixteenth century, at least some English Catholics agreed. Writ-ing in the 1560s in defense of Purgatory, Cardinal William Allen(1532–1594) claims that “this doctrine (as the whole worldknoweth) founded all Bishoprics, builded all Churches, raised allOratories, instituted all Colleges, endowed all Schools, maintainedall hospitals, set forward all works of charity and religion, of whatsort soever they be.”10 Though it received its full doctrinal elabora-tion quite late—the historian Jacques Le Goff places the “birth ofPurgatory” in the latter half of the twelfth century11—the notion


of an intermediate place between Heaven and Hell and the systemof indulgences and pardons meant to relieve the sufferings of soulsimprisoned within it had come to seem, for many heretics andorthodox believers alike, essential to the institutional structure,authority, and power of the Catholic Church.

This degree of importance is certainly an exaggeration, but it isnot a complete travesty: by the late Middle Ages in Western Eu-rope, Purgatory had achieved both a doctrinal and a social success.That is, it was by no means exclusively the esoteric doctrine oftheologians but part of a much broader, popular understandingof the meaning of existence, the nature of Christian faith, and thestructure of family and community. Hence, to cite a single Englishexample, the various fifteenth-century devotional treatises knowncollectively as The Lay Folks Mass Book include for recital after theelevation of the Host a vernacular prayer for the dead. The faithfulpray for those souls, “father soul, mother soul, brother dear, sisterssouls, sib men and other sere [relatives and other particular individu-als],” who may be suffering in “Purgatory pain.”12 The prayer—from a text that is not a piece of the official liturgy but a modelof private, vernacular faith, intended to be read while the priestsconduct the Latin Mass—pleads that bonds shackling these deadbe unlocked, so that they can pass from torment to everlasting joy.

The simple English prayer is evidence—to which much morecould be added—that the attempt to free souls from the prisonhouse of Purgatory was not exclusively the work of a priestly classof specialists. There was such a class, large in numbers, as Fish andother Protestant polemicists stridently insisted, whose mainte-nance cost a considerable amount of money. But their rituals,though regarded as particularly efficacious, were not the only assis-tance that the dead could receive, and lay persons could supple-ment the liturgical ceremonies that their donations sponsoredwith a variety of less formal (and less expensive) acts on behalf oftheir loved ones and themselves. In Catholic countries that did notpass through periods of iconoclastic violence, one can still see,particularly in small towns, many traces of this popular piety, oftenaccorded formal, if grudging, recognition by the church. Thus, for


Fig. 1. “40 days of indulgence” Votive plaque beneath image of Virgin,Erice, Sicily. Photo: Stephen Greenblatt.

example, embedded in the stone walls along the narrow lanes ofErice, in western Sicily, there are numerous small, rather crudevotive images beneath which elegant inscriptions, dating for themost part from the eighteenth century, promise the remission ofperiods of purgatorial suffering for those who stand before theimages and recite prayers (fig. 1). I asked a local resident once, anelderly woman, whether people still stopped and said the ritualwords. No, she replied, not any more. Was that, I inquired, becausethe practice was now regarded as superstitious? Not at all, she said;the priests now wanted you to pay for prayers in church. To besure, these prayers were much more powerful, but they were tooexpensive, and everyone she knew had stopped buying them. Butif the price came down, she added, more people would certainlywant them.

Along with private fasts and vigils, such prayers—casual, infor-mal, recited in the streets—certainly did not replace the properintercessory gestures provided for by the “pious bequests” made inlarge numbers of wills, but they do clearly indicate that the task ofassisting the soul’s passage to bliss was not entrusted entirely tothe certified authorities on the afterlife. Nonspecialists understood


that they could do things in their everyday lives to ease the painof those they loved or to shorten their own anticipated share ofpostmortem pain.

Charity to the dead, whether performed privately or in public,by lay persons or by priests, began at home. But the effort to allevi-ate suffering extended beyond the immediate circle of self, family,and friends to “all Christian souls.” On All Hallows’ Eve, beforeAll Saints’ Day (November 1), bells rang throughout the night inEnglish towns and villages, as communities joined in prayers forthe whole, vast company of the dead, and on the day following,All Souls’ Day (November 2), it was customary to distribute“soul cakes.” John Mirk, canon of Lilleshall, Shropshire, in themid–fifteenth century, lamented that the custom of giving breadfor the souls of the dead—“hoping with each loaf to get a soulout of Purgatory”—was in decline, but it evidently survived, atleast in rural areas, into the eighteenth century.13 The Sarum Prymerof 1538 includes “A prayer to God for them that be departed,having none to pray for them.” These are souls, as the prayer putsit, “which either by negligence of them that be living, or longprocess of time, are forgotten of their friends and posterity” andtherefore “have neither hope nor comfort in their torments.”14

Similarly, the Sarum Horae of 1531 tells those who are entering agraveyard that Pope John IV has granted as many days of par-don as there are bodies buried in that place to those who recite aprayer that begins as follows: “All hail, all faithful souls, whosebodies do here and everywhere rest in the dust [Salvete vos omnesfideles animae, quarum corpora hic et ubique requiescunt in pulvere]:the Lord Jesus Christ, who hath redeemed both you and us withhis most precious blood, vouchsafe to deliver you from pains.”15

Such customs implicitly acknowledge that an ordinary person’sprincipal focus is likely to be personal—the overriding concern iswith one’s own fate or with the fate of particular, named lovedones—even as they give form to and reward a more capacioussense of connectedness. Though the rituals of everyday life cen-tered on the intimate and familial, they encoded the sense of alarger bond as well, linking the living with the souls of countlessprevious generations.


One does not need the whole elaborate doctrine of Purgatory,of course, to feel linked to the dead: memory and a sense of theshared human condition will suffice. To be sure, in most tradi-tional cultures this feeling of connectedness acquires a more spe-cific set of topographical references, but this localization had al-ready occurred many centuries before the invention of Purgatory.Christianity had long offered its believers two principal places,Heaven and Hell, in which to situate definitively those who hadonce lived in the world and had now ceased to exist. Purgatoryforged a different kind of link between the living and the dead, or,rather, it enabled the dead to be not completely dead—not as ut-terly gone, finished, complete as those whose souls resided foreverin Hell or Heaven.16

It was not possible (or, in any case, not licit in orthodox Chris-tianity) to pray for the souls in Hell, in hope either of mitigatingtheir pain or of augmenting it. The unspeakable tortures of thedamned could be contemplated with horror or with fierce satisfac-tion, but those who suffered for eternity were beyond the effectiverange of human intervention. Saint Augustine said that even if helearned that his father was burning in Hell, he would not attemptto do anything to succor him, for he knew that he was beyondassistance. The harsh sentiment is echoed in the fourteenth-cen-tury Treatise of the Manner and Mede of the Mass: “If I knew that myfather were wholly held in Hell,” the text puts it, I would no morepray for him “than for a dog that was dead.”17

The blessed similarly had no need of human prayers; their con-dition, too, was fixed for eternity. The living might hope that theirfriends and family in Heaven might remember them and offerthem some spiritual assistance, but there was nothing that souls inbliss could want in return. A large group of the dead, however,continued to exist in time and to need something that they couldget only from the living, something that would enable them toescape from the hideous, dark prison in which they were trapped.

The lay community was obviously never as thoroughly boundup with a general concern for postmortem welfare as were thosemonastic and conventual communities where, in certain cases, itwas customary to pray daily in the actual presence of members


of the order who had died. The nineteenth-century ecclesiasticalantiquaryWilliamMaskell cites such a custom recorded at DurhamAbbey: “Also the monks was accustomed every day, to go throughthe cloister, in at the usher’s door, and so through the entry, inunder the prior’s lodging, and straight into the scentorie garth[churchyard], where all the monks was buried, and they did all bare-headed, a certain long space, praying amongst the tombs andthrowghes [sepulchres] for their brethren souls being buried there,and, when they had done their prayers, then they did return to thecloister.”18 The formal arrangement that facilitated such obser-vances—seats designed to drain off the liquids from the corpses,etc.—may still be glimpsed, for example, in the somber architec-ture of an underground chapel linked to the cathedral on Ischia,a chapel that must have seemed to the nuns to be a powerful repre-sentation of the purgatorial afterlife.

But the practice of burying the dead in the hallowed ground ofthe churchyard or, in the case of the wealthiest and most powerfulparishioners, under the floor or in the walls of the church itselfmeant that ordinary men and women, including those quite un-interested in theological niceties, worshiped in close proximityto the mortal remains of those whose souls had passed on to theirreward or punishment. Even the liberal use of incense, flowers,and sprigs of rosemary could not altogether have masked the smellof decay that medieval and early modern burial practices almostinevitably introduced into the still air of churches.19 The wall paint-ings, carved doors and capitals, altarpieces, stained-glass windows,and funeral monuments further reinforced the deep link betweenChristianity and the fate of the dead.

Not only doctrine, then, but also chants, gestures, images, andthe very air that the faithful breathed said the same thing: the bor-der between this world and the afterlife was not firmly and irrevo-cably closed. For a large group of mortals—perhaps the majorityof them—time did not come to an end at the moment of death.The book was not quite shut. One chapter remained to be written,and if the outcome was fixed and settled, the sequence of events,the duration, and the quality of the experience were not. The liv-ing could have an ongoing relationship with one important seg-


ment of the dead, and not simply a relationship constituted bymemory. There were things that the living could do for the dead—and not to do these things, or to delay doing them, or to do someand not others, was also a course of action in this ongoing relation-ship. The whole social and economic importance of Purgatory inCatholic Europe rested on the belief that prayers, fasts, almsgiving,and masses constituted a valuable commodity—“suffrages,” as theywere termed—that could in effect be purchased, directly or indi-rectly, on behalf of specific dead persons.

The blessed souls inHeaven, of course, had no need of suffrages,since they had already attained eternal bliss, while the damnedsouls in Hell could not make use of them, since they were con-demned to an eternity of irremediable torment. But imperfectsouls, souls still bearing the stains of the faults they had committedin mortal life, would have to endure excruciating pain. Fortunately,suffrages were available to reduce the intensity and duration of thisagony. Masses lovingly paid for and performed in memory of thedead were particularly efficacious, as were the prayers of the poorand sick offered in grateful memory of their benefactor. Similarly,the pious fasts, prayers, and alms of relatives and friends could bedirected to relieve the sufferings of a named individual whom theybelieved to be in Purgatory. Moreover, the pope was the adminis-trator, in effect, of an enormous account of “superabundant satis-factions” left by Christ and further enhanced by the saints andmartyrs, an account that could be expended, in the form of indul-gences, on behalf of deserving souls.20 The reckoning in every casewas strictly individual and scrupulously proportional to the gravityof the particular sins, but it was possible for individuals after deathto receive help from others, just as living debtors languishing inprison could have their debts paid by their friends. “Thus devoutprayers said with humility,” writes the poet andmonk John Lydgate(ca. 1370–ca. 1450), “Delivereth souls out of Purgatory.”21

Popular religion in the Middle Ages conjured up vivid imagesof the efficacy of this help. One of the most widely read books inthe period, the Golden Legend (ca. 1260) by Jacobus de Voragine(Jacopo da Varazze), recounts a vision granted to a warden ofSaint Peter’s:


Then the angel led the warden to another place and showedhim people of both sexes, some reclining on golden beds,others at tables enjoying delicious viands, still others nakedand needy, begging for help. This place, the angel said, wasPurgatory. Those enjoying abundance were the souls forwhom their friends provided plentiful aid, whereas those inneed had no one who cared for them.22

Though the story ostensibly functions as a justification for thenewly instituted Feast of All Souls “on which day those who had noone to pray for them would at least share in the general commemo-ration,” it makes clear the enormous value of acquiring specialprayers.

The value is heightened in The Golden Legend by the familiar em-phasis on the pains of Purgatory. The emphasis, which often seemsghoulish, made perfect institutional sense. Since the ultimate fateof those who reached Purgatory was fixed and immutable—allwould eventually reach Heaven—there had to be some reason toinduce men and women to busy themselves and give their worldlygoods to help the souls who were already imprisoned there or toabridge their own possible future prison terms. The reason wasanxiety. Voragine rehearses, for example, the story of Master Silooriginally told by the scholastic theologian Peter the Chanter (d.1197) and found as well in the influential preacher James of Vitry(d. 1240) and the Dominican Stephen of Bourbon (d. 1261).

Master Silo had a colleague, a scholar who was very ill, andSilo asked him urgently to come back after he died and tellhim, Silo, how things were with him. Some days after his deaththe scholar appeared to Silo, wearing a cape made of parch-ment written all over with sophisms, and woven of flames in-side. The master asked who he was and he answered: “I amindeed the one who promised to come back to you.” Askedhow things were with him he said: “This cape weighs uponme and presses me down more than if I were carrying a toweron my shoulders. It is given to me to wear on account of thepride I had in my sophisms. The flames that flare inside itare the delicate, mottled furs I used to wear, and they torture


and burn me.” The master, however, thought that this penaltywas fairly light, so that the dead man told him to put out hishand and feel how light the punishment really was. He heldout his hand and the scholar let a drop of his sweat fall on it.The drop went through the master’s hand like an arrow, caus-ing him excruciating pain. “That’s how I feel all over,” thescholar said.23

After all, as Aquinas wrote, the least degree of pain in Purgatory“surpasses the greatest pain that one can endure in this world.”24

THE PRICE OF PRAYERS

Master Silo’s response to the ghost was to abandon the world atonce and enter religious life.25 Others less willing to forsake worldlywealth altogether used at least a portion of that wealth to assurethemselves postmortem assistance. There was a range of availablepackages, as it were, from a simple funeral mass to the popular andmoderately priced trental—a set of thirty requiem masses, said onthe same day or on successive days—to the extremely expensivechantry, an endowment for the maintenance of a priest to singdaily mass for the founder or for someone specified by thefounder, often in an ornate, purpose-built chapel.26 On the eve ofthe Battle of Agincourt, queasy at the memory of his usurping fa-ther’s murder of Richard II, Shakespeare’s Henry V reminds Godof his lavish acts of contrition:

Five hundred poor have I in yearly payWho twice a day their withered hands hold upToward Heaven to pardon blood. And I have builtTwo chantries, where the sad and solemn priestsSing still for Richard’s soul.

(4.1.280–84)27

Two chantries were an extravagance, even for amonarch, but therewere in this case special circumstances.28 Aware that his claim tothe throne is tainted, Henry in effect is bargaining with God orwith the vengeful spirit of the murdered Richard, and the bar-


gaining chips are chantries. “Not today, O Lord,” he prays, at-tempting to distract God from the reckoning he fears will be due,

O not today, think not upon the faultMy father made in compassing the crown.

(4.1.274–76)

At this critical moment the king is concerned not with the fate ofhis soul but with the outcome of the battle: perhaps this served forShakespeare and his audience as a spectacular, if morally problem-atical, display of heroic leadership.

Ordinarily, in making provisions for the afterlife, most people,including kings, wanted the sad and solemn priests to pray for theirown souls. Faced with the terrifying prospect of purgatorial tor-ment, the wealthy were willing to part with a great deal of money,particularly at the moment that they were forced to part with theworld itself. The most spectacular instance of this willingness wasthat of a king who found himself in a position not altogether unlikethat of Henry V—a king, that is, who wore a crown that had beenwrested by violence from the legitimate ruler. The king in questionwas Henry VII, who came to the throne in 1485 by killing theYorkist king Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field.

Henry VII was not an extravagant monarch—he was thought, ifanything, to be something of a skinflint—but the magnificent lateGothic chapel he ordered built at Westminster was, according toone architectural historian, “the largest and certainly the most ex-pensive structure ever built for funerary purposes.”29 Three monksof Westminster were to serve as chantry priests, perpetually prayingfor Henry’s soul, and these constant suffrages were to be supple-mented by anniversary masses in an impressive number of cathe-dral, conventual, and university churches. But even these extraor-dinary efforts to hasten his soul through Purgatory were notenough for a king who evidently thought he might be facing a longprison sentence in the afterlife. During his lifetime Henry foundeda hospital and an almshouse whose grateful inhabitants could becounted on to offer up a steady supply of prayers, and in his willhe provided for the establishment of two further hospitals, alongwith other contributions clearly designed to generate suffrages.


Finally, he saw to it that immediately after his death ten thousandmasses would be said for the remission of his sins and the good ofhis soul. Ten thousand masses.

This was the father of the king to whom Simon Fish dedicatedhis Supplication of the Beggars. Somewhere buried in the story ofHenry VIII’s suppression of the monasteries and seizure of theirgreat wealth is a son’s violent repudiation of his father’s attemptsto ease his soul’s torments. Between 1536 and 1539 Henry VIIItook back for his own uses what Henry VII had laid out for him-self—that, and much more. If his own last will and testament,drawn up and revised before his death in 1547, is any indication,the son by no means repudiated the religious beliefs to which hisfather adhered. But the terms of this will perhaps betray some am-biguous sign of the influence of The Supplication of the Beggars and,in any case, certainly reflect the silencing of the chantries. “We willand charge our Executors,” Henry VIII commanded,

that they dispose and give in alms to the most poor and needypeople that may be found (common beggars as much as maybe avoided) in as short space as possibly they may after ourdeparture out of this transitory life, one thousand marks of law-ful money of England, part in the same place and thereabouts,where it shall please Almighty God to call us to his Mercy, partby the way, and part in the same place of our burial after theirdiscretions, and to move the poor people that shall have ouralms to pray heartily unto God for remission of our offensesand the wealth of our soul.30

“In as short space as possibly they may after our departure”: HenryVIII does not want to linger in the fires of Purgatory. Thousandsof masses will not be sung to haste him toward Heaven, but a thou-sand marks could purchase the prayers of many poor people. Inthe unlikely event that he did not go straight to Hell, he wouldcertainly have needed all of them.

Reformers who were centrally concerned to challenge the doc-trine of Purgatory would not have been content with the king’sprovisions, but at least the money was not going to enrich thepriesthood. Protestant polemics of the sixteenth century are virtu-


ally obsessed with the amount of wealth wasted in the vain beliefthat masses can shorten the torment. By this belief, BarnabeGooge, a prolific translator and antipapal polemicist, writes in ThePopish Kingdom (1570),

so many altars in the Churches up did rise,By this the number grows so great of Priests to sacrifice.From hence arose such shameful swarms of Monks with

great excess,Whom profit of this Mass doth keep in slothful idleness.For this same cause such mighty kings, and famous

Princes high,Ordained Masses for their souls, and Priests continually,With great revenues yearly left and everlasting fee,An easy way to joy, if it with scriptures might agree.31

In this view, the immense outpouring of wealth originated in thedesire of kings and princes to secure for their souls an “easy wayto joy,” and then spread to the whole class of the rich and privi-leged, eager to attain similar benefits for themselves:

Straight after these, the wealthy men took up this fancy vain,And built them Chapels every one, and Chaplains did retainAt home, or in their parish Church, where Mass they

daily sung,For safeguard of their family, and of their children young.Both for their friends alive, and such as long before did die,And in the Purgatory flames tormented sore doe lie.

The theology focused on the sins and sufferings of individuals, but,as Googe’s account suggests, the actual observances had a widerreach. Chantries and other costly ritual practices often served aspious attempts to help whole networks of family and friends, alongwith the donor himself.

Henry VII’s will notwithstanding, enormous bequests of the kindGooge attacks seem in reality to have been on the wane well beforethe Reformation. According to the historian Christopher Haigh,by the latter part of the fifteenth century “the endowment of chan-tries on a large scale was clearly a thing of the past in most parts


of England.”32 But Googe and his fellow polemicists are certainlycorrect in claiming that English Catholics invested heavily in suf-frages. Medieval wills are full of provisions for the acquisition ofprayers, along with almsgiving and other acts of pious benefac-tion.33 As we have seen, the monks of Westminster Abbey, who saidmasses for the kings of England, were especially well-endowed ben-eficiaries of the belief in Purgatory, but virtually all monasteriesand churches in the Middle Ages would have been the recipientsof donations in exchange for prayers for the dead.34

Theologians assured the faithful that their generous acts of pen-ance and commissioned prayers would not be wasted, even if thosefor whom the prayers were said went directly to Heaven (or, forthat matter, to Hell). Prayers that could not be used by the personfor whom they were intended would go to the next of kin.35 Onlyif no such person were available would the benefit of those prayersbe deposited in the papal treasury, along with the supererogatoryvirtues of the saints and martyrs, to be dispensed to those whoproperly paid for them. It was always better to err on the side ofexcess, since there could be no waste, and since inadequate suf-frages would work inadequately.36

Catholic texts repeatedly emphasize that the donations on be-half of someone’s soul have to be made in the right spirit,37 butthey could also be amazingly explicit about the benefits that moneycould buy. And though the doctrine fostered familial solidarity andthe bonds of charity and remembrance linking the living and thedead, appeals were often made directly to self-interest. Hence, forexample, the seventeenth-century English Catholic writer JaneOwen urges her wealthy readers to acts of frankly self-serving gen-erosity: “O how many peculiar Advocates and Intercessors of the thenmost blessed Souls (released out of Purgatory) might a rich Catho-lic purchase to himself, by this former means, thereby to plead hiscause before the Throne of Almighty God, in his greatest need?”38

The French Jesuit Etienne Binet, in a text translated into Englishin the seventeenth century, emphasizes the burning shame thatclever, rich people, finding themselves after death in the sulfurousand stinking smoke of Purgatory, will feel when they realize “thatthe souls of many country clowns, mere idiots, poor women and


simple religious persons go straight up to Heaven, while they liethere burning.” Their shame, in this account, will derive less fromcontemplation of their sins than from realization of their stupidcarelessness: “And for a handful of Silver, they might have re-deemed many years of torments in that fiery Furnace; and alas,they chose rather to give it to their dogs and their horses.”39

Like Owen, Binet warns parents against counting on their chil-dren to provide suffrages for them. It is important to make allthe necessary financial arrangements before your death, for yourheirs will only want more money from your estate and will leaveyou frying.40 Moreover, if you are hesitating between relieving asoul in Purgatory and relieving a beggar or a sick person in thislife, you should consider the absolute certainty of the formercourse of action, underwritten by the full faith and credit of theCatholic Church, and the gross uncertainty of the latter. If yougive to a living person, Binet points out, “you may often fail of youraim and lose both your money and your labor.” Why? “Considerthe men themselves who for the most part are Ungrateful, Deceit-ful, Wicked, and so far unsatisfied, that you have never donewith them.”41

There were some, not surprisingly, who thought it unjust thatthe wealthy could purchase spiritual benefits denied to the poor.“It may fall that the pope grant to rich worldly men that theyshould go straight to heaven without pain of Purgatory,” complainsthe fourteenth-century reformer John Wycliffe, “and deny this topoor men, keep they never so [however carefully they keep] God’slaw.”42 Wycliffe believed in the existence of Purgatory, though herejected prayers for the dead and strenuously objected to the pur-chase of suffrages. But even among those who concluded that Pur-gatory was a fable, the charge of unfairness recurs. A poem by thesixteenth-century Scottish Protestant minister John Wedderburn(1500?–1556) begins by declaring happily, if somewhat paradoxi-cally, that the fire of Purgatory is at once “false” and extin-guished—“Of the fals fyre of Purgatorie, / Is nocht left in anesponk [spark]”—but continues with a complaint that the priestsprovided relief from its excruciating pains only to the rich:


At Corps presence [Mass] thay wald sing,For ryches, to slokkin [slake] the fyre:Bot all pure folk that had na thingWas skaldit baine and lyre [scalded bone and flesh].43

The injustice so evident on earth, with the rich living in ease andthe poor suffering miserably, is extended by the purchase of suf-frages beyond the grave. As the old saying goes, “No penny, nopaternoster.”44

Aquinas evidently discussed the problem, since the Supplement,composed by his disciples from notes and added to the Summatheologica, addresses it. The rich are not unfairly favored, he con-cludes, because the expiation of penalties “is as nothing comparedwith the possession of the kingdom of Heaven, and there the poorare favored.”45 From this perspective, the availability of suffrages tothe wealthy is a charitable gesture toward a group whose ordinarychances of reaching Heaven are roughly comparable to those of acamel passing through the eye of a needle. As one might imagine,this argument, however clever, did not quiet all resentment.

In England, as more famously in Germany, the resentment wasparticularly though not exclusively focused on the sale of indul-gences. As early as 1395, the Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards articu-lated some of the key charges against the pope rehearsed by Protes-tant agitators more than a century later: if the pope actuallypossesses a vast fund of supererogatory works of virtue, as he sayshe does, then “he is a treasurer most banished out of charity, sincehe may deliver the prisoners that been in pain at his own will, andmake himself so that he shall never come there.”46 The argumentwas easily extended from the papacy to other parts of the clericalhierarchy. “Why make ye men believe,” asks Jack Upland, thespeaker in a poem associated with Langland,

that your golden trental sung of you,to take therefore ten shillings,or at least five shillingswill bring souls out of Hell,or out of purgatory?


If this be sooth, certes,ye might bring all souls out of pain;and that will ye not,and then ye be out of charity.47

All of the ill will normally aroused by money changers, usurers,and bankers is thus directed against the pope and the priests withtheir treasury of unspent suffrages.

To the ordinary feelings awakened by a tantalizing glimpse ofhoarded riches were added the fear and anguish deliberately culti-vated in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by popular preach-ers. As an esoteric doctrine among intellectuals, Purgatory couldbe the subject of complex debates about the quantification of qual-ity, the ethics of proportionality, the difference between purgato-rial and consummatory fire, the precise jurisdictional claims of theChurch Militant, the degree to which souls could be said to un-dergo their pains “voluntarily,” the distinction between pardon “asto the penalty” (quoad poenam) and pardon “as to the guilt” (quoadculpam), and so forth. But as a popular belief, Purgatory aroused—or at least was meant to arouse—fear. The theologians who teasedout the subtle science of the hereafter had, for the most part, areassuring access to the fund of suffrages; the great majority ofChristians did not. The faithful who were most deeply moved bythe visions of torment were the most anxious to acquire some re-mission. To those who lacked the money to pay for such remission,the system of indulgences must have been particularly infuriating.“Why busy ye not to hear / to shrift of poor folk, / as well as ofrich,” asks Jack Upland; “Why will ye not be at her dirges, / as yehave been at rich men’s?”48

This anguished sense that priests were covetously holding backa benefit they could be freely distributing made the doctrine ofPurgatory—or at least the institutional practices that the RomanCatholic Church had built up around the doctrine—vulnerable.In A Supplication for the Beggars Simon Fish takes up the smolderingissue of fairness, but he sidesteps class antagonism by pitting onegroup of beggars, the blind, ill, or impoverished, against another


group, the hypocritical idlers who contrive by “sleights” to exactmore and more money. “Nor have they any other color to gatherthese yearly exactions,” Fish writes, “but that they say they pray forus to God to deliver our souls out of the pains of purgatory” (419).

Not everyone is taken in by the fraud. “Many men of great litera-ture and judgment” dare to point out that Purgatory does not exist.Others observe that if there is a Purgatory, and if the pardons thatthe pope sells for money can in fact deliver souls from its pains, asthe Catholic Church claims, then those same pardons given freely,without charge, would surely be equally effective. Moreover, if thepope can deliver one soul from torment, he can presumably de-liver a thousand, and if he can deliver a thousand, he can presum-ably deliver everyone, “and so destroy Purgatory.” If he possessessuch power and does not use it, if he leaves souls to languish inprison unless he is given money, then the pope is nothing but “acruel tyrant without all charity.” Indeed, if all priests and friars—“the whole sort of the spirituality”—will allow souls to be punishedfor want of prayers and will “pray for no man but for them thatgive them money” (419), then they are all tyrants.

Anyone who publicly says such things is taking a serious risk,Fish acknowledges, for the priests are quick to accuse their criticsof heresy. In fact, even those who have a clear cause of actionagainst a cleric—for murder, “ravishment of his wife, of his daugh-ter, robbery, trespass, mayhem, debt, or any other offence” (417)—are afraid to seek legal remedy for fear of excommunication.More-over, there is no recourse to Parliament. If the king himselfthought to propose laws in Parliament against the priests, Fishwrites provocatively, “I am in doubt whether ye be able: Are theynot stronger in your own parliament house than yourself?” (417).

But, if he acts on his own authority, the king has enough powerto save his realm and succor his poor starving subjects. He can doso at a stroke by seizing the wealth that the wolvish priests havestolen from the people and using that wealth to relieve the needy.As for the thousands of lazy monks and friars, Fish urges the kingto put an end to their racket once and for all: “Tie these holy idlethieves to the carts to be whipped naked about every market town


til they will fall to labor that they by their importunate beggingtake not away the alms that the good Christian people would giveunto us sore, impotent, miserable people” (34).

THE DEAD HAND

Fish’s anticlericalism may well have struck a chord among impo-tent, miserable people unable to afford suffrages, but far moreimportant, in a polemic addressed to Henry VIII, was the factthat the English state had for a long time been concerned aboutthe fiscal implications of intercessory institutions like chantries.49

The concern, which often flared into hostility and covetousness,centered on the fact that over the years a great deal of propertyhad been progressively removed from the tax rolls and given indonation to the church. Ecclesiastical property was, at least in the-ory, inalienable; hence lands and other goods donated by thosewishing to secure prayers for the suffering souls in Purgatoryceased to change hands and became “dead.” As early as the thir-teenth century, statutes attempted to limit or control what wascalled mortmain—literally, in French, “dead hand”: property for-ever lost to a corporate body that never died and hence never re-leased its iron grip on its rents and income. The statutes helped toproduce income for the crown, by imposing costly fines and othercharges on those who wished to donate real estate to the church,but they did not stop such donations altogether, nor did they wrestproperty already in the ecclesiastical dead hand back into taxablesocial circulation.

Originally devised to restrain gifts to the church for the sayingof prayers, by the sixteenth century mortmain had become virtuallysynonymous with such gifts. In Bale’s fiercely anti-Catholic playKing Johan, the character called Sedition announces that he playsmany clerical parts:

Sometime I can be a monk in a long sad cowl;Sometime I can be a nun and look like an owl;Sometime a canon in a surplice fair and white;A chapterhouse monk sometime I appear in sight . . .


Sometime the bishop with a miter and a copeA gray friar sometime with cut shoes and a rope;Sometime I can play the white monk, sometime the friar,The Purgatory priest and every mans wife desire.This company hath provided for me mortmain,For that I might ever among their sort remain.50

So ineffective have the mortmain statutes been, Fish tells the king,so successfully have the priests exploited people’s faith and fear,that the realm has been split in two: the temporal kingdom is incompetition with what the clergy call the spiritual kingdom, orwhat would be better termed “the kingdom of the bloodsuppers”(418). And the competitive advantage lies with the priests, forwhatever “is once given them cometh never from them again.” Inthe fantastic imagery of A Supplication for the Beggars the CatholicChurch figures as an enormous maw into which everything—notproperty alone but the whole moral and political life of the na-tion—disappears: “O how all the substance of your Realm forth-with, your sword, power, crown, dignity, and obedience of yourpeople, runneth headlong into the insatiable whirlpool of thesegreedy goulafres [gluttons] to be swallowed and devoured” (419).51

For Fish, the nightmare is not simply that the kingdom is dividedbut that it will eventually pass by an inexorable logic into the solepossession of the priests. More stringent mortmain legislation willnot suffice to avert this end, for unless they come to understandthat priests are “cruel, unclean, unmerciful, and hypocrites” (420),pious laymen will only resent attempts to restrict their ability todonate their wealth to the church. “I am as good a man as myfather,” the lords, knights, squires, gentlemen, and yeomen of En-gland will tell themselves; “Whymay I not as well give them asmuchas my father did?” (420). Until people grasp that the whole systemof papal indulgences and pardons is a hypocritical fraud, they willcontrive to evade any restrictions in order to purchase remissionfrom purgatorial pain, as their forefathers did before them. Gov-ernment half-measures will only slow the church’s steady accumu-lation of wealth, not stop it. Or as Tyndale, with a longer view ofthe same process, puts it, “If men should continue to buy prayer


four or five hundred years more, as they have done, there wouldnot be a foot of ground in Christendom, neither any worldly thing,which they, that will be called spiritual only, should not possess.And thus all should be called spiritual.”52

THE COMMODIFICATION

OF FABLES

“If men should continue to buy prayer”: for the early-sixteenth-century reformers, the fuel driving this whole monstrous jugger-naut is a corrupt dream, the dream that salvation from a temporarypostmortem punishment can be obtained through the purchaseof prayers. “This Purgatory and the Pope’s pardons,” Fish writes tothe king, “is all the cause of the translation of your kingdom so fastinto their hands” (419–20). And the most remarkable feature ofthis immense “translation” is that it is entirely dependent on aninvention. “There is,” as Fish flatly and accurately writes, “not oneword spoken of it in all Holy Scripture.” “For Purgatory inventedwas,” as a crude polemic printed in 1570 puts it, “for to persuadethat Popes had power, / to pardon every crime. Not only herewhen men doth live, / but also after death.”53 The faithful havebeen led to believe, without any scriptural authority, in the exis-tence of a realm between Heaven and Hell and then, still morefantastically, led to believe that the pope has the power to mitigatethe torments of souls imprisoned in this realm. Driven by fear anda longing for some protection from the flames, generations ofpious Christians have been lured by a fiction into handing overtheir wealth to clerical drones.

In their insatiable craving for riches, these drones also resort tophysical intimidation and coercion. The Henrician reformersdwell on the notorious case of Richard Hunne, who refused to pay“mortuary”—the customary gift claimed by a priest on the deathof a parishioner—for his dead infant son. Hunne was accused ofheresy, imprisoned, and then found hanging in his cell on Decem-ber 4, 1514.54 (It is worth recalling that Tyndale, Frith, Latimer,and others who took up the assault on Purgatory were all martyred,as Fish would certainly have been, had Thomas More gotten his


hands on him.) But Protestant polemicists know that violence isnot enough to account for the systematic exploitation of a wholesociety, from aristocrats and warriors to the simplest of villagers,nor is the limitless venality of a well-organized, complex, bureau-cratic institution. The explanation, rather, lies in the way that fa-bles seize hold of the mind, create vast unreal spaces, and peoplethose spaces with imaginary beings and detailed events. Thepriests’ principal power derives from their hold upon the imagina-tion of their flock.

Like Fish, Tyndale does not altogether and explicitly deny thatthere could be some middle state, between death and judgment.“It seem not impossible haply,” he writes with a deliberate flourishof uncertainty, “that there might be a place where the souls mightbe kept for a space, to be taught and instructed.”55 Such a hypothet-ical proposition is permissible; the task is to refuse detailed imagin-ings of the kind that the papists offer: “[Y]et that there should besuch a jail as they jangle, and such fashions as they feign, is plainlyimpossible, and repugnant to the scripture.”

Here, as in other aspects of his thought, Tyndale is closely follow-ing Luther, who tried at least in his early writings to keep open thepossibility of a place of purgation without imagining anything veryexplicit about it. As a pious young Catholic, Luther—imbued withthat aspect of the doctrine that stressed the duty to help thosewhom one loved—had wanted to free his grandfather from Purga-tory and therefore ascended the Santa Scala in Rome on his knees,reciting an Our Father on each step. In this way, it was said, it waspossible to save a soul. But when he had arrived at the top, doubtseized him: “Who knows if it is really true?”56 Despite this doubt,in his “Defense and Explanation of All the Articles,” Luther stilldeclares that he personally does not deny the existence of Purga-tory: “I still hold that it exists . . . though I have found no way ofproving it incontrovertibly from Scripture or reason.” But in theabsence of such incontrovertible proof, it is wrong, he writes, toforce anyone to come to the same conclusion: “My advice is thatno one allow the pope to invent new articles of faith, but be willingto remain in ignorance, with St. Augustine, about what the soulsin Purgatory are doing and what their condition is.”57


By 1530 Luther came to denounce the whole notion of Purga-tory, but in the “Defense and Explanation,” written in 1520, he wasstill clinging to a minimalist vision of suffering souls: “For us it isenough to know that they suffer great and unbearable pain andcrave your help.”58 Any further inquiry is a form of dangerous curi-osity, curiosity that leads, as the Puritan divine Thomas Wilcox putit in 1581, to an uncontrolled proliferation of fantasies: “For if onemay be suffered in the vain and idle imaginations of his own heartand head to discourse without the warrant of the word, upon thisor any other such like point . . . why shall it not be lawful, for othersto doe the like? And so by that means, we shall have a whole worldof men’s fantasies propounded unto us. . . .”59 The key is to stoprampant speculation, to learn to be lowly wise.

Several prominent English Protestants in the early sixteenth cen-tury attempt, like Luther, to hold onto a notion of Purgatory butto strip it of its specificity, its space, its rituals. The great preacherHugh Latimer writes that there is some middle state, but the soulsin it are probably not tortured, even if they sound as though theyare in pain: “They need to cry loud to God: they be in Christ andChrist in them.” These souls might do something for the living,but the living can do (and need do) nothing for them, for theirsalvation is assured: “I had rather be in Purgatory,” Latimer writeswryly, “than in the bishop of London’s prison; for in this I mightdie bodily for lack of meat; in that I could not; in this I might dieghostly for fear of pain, or lack of good counsel; in that I couldnot: in this I might be in extreme necessity; in that I could not.” Itis pointless to endow prayers for the dead, nor indeed would thesouls in Purgatory desire such empty gifts: “[W]e see not whoneedeth in Purgatory; but we see who needeth in this world. . . . Iam sure the souls in Purgatory be so charitable, and of charityso loth to have God dishonoured, that they would have nothingwithdrawn from the poor here in this world, to be bestowed uponthem, which might occasion the dishonour of God.”60 Moneywasted on Purgatory is not only withdrawn from the poor; it iswithheld from the state: giving money for chantries, trentals, andthe like, Latimer writes wittily, is rendering to God that which is


Caesar’s. As for the questions that remain about the residual, vagueconcept of Purgatory, Latimer, like Luther, advises a frank expres-sion of uncertainty: “Now my answer is this: ‘I cannot tell’ .”61

But remaining in ignorance is actually quite difficult. Tyndalenotes two particular qualities of the imagination that pull power-fully toward a fraudulent specificity: an extraordinary capacity toshape textual materials in an endless variety of forms and anequally extraordinary capacity to give these forms the illusion ofsolidity. Mocking the competition among the followers of variousscholastic theologians, Tyndale writes that “every man to maintainhis doctor withal, corrupteth the scripture, and fashioneth it afterhis own imagination, as a potter doth his clay.” The conventionalimage of the potter here serves to insist upon radical malleability:“Of what text thou Hell provest, will another prove Purgatory; an-other limbo patrum; and another the assumption of our lady; andanother shall prove of the same text that an ape hath a tail.”62 Itmight seem that the consequence of this absolute interpretive li-cense would be to render Scripture blank or invisible, but for Tyn-dale its principal corrupting effect is, rather, as he puts it, tomateri-alize or “darken” the Word of God. The false prelates made us“image-servants; referring our deeds unto the person of God, andworshipping him as an image of our own imagination, with bodilywork; saying moreover, if we would not do such penance here attheir injunctions, we must do it in another world; and so feignedPurgatory, where we must suffer seven years for every sin.”63

Through the imagination, illusions assume the opacity and materi-ality of bodies, bodies that require “bodily work,” and the faithfulare thus lured into idolatry.

Purgatory, concludes Tyndale, is “a poet’s fable.”64

THROUGHOUT the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Protestantsof all persuasions return again and again to this set of ideas: notonly the fraudulence of Purgatory, its lack of scriptural basis, andits corrupt institutional uses but its special relation to dream, fan-tasy, and imagination. At one extreme we may take Richard Cor-bett, a celebrated wit, friend of Ben Jonson, bishop of Oxford and


of Norwich, and a sharply satirical anti-Puritan as well as anti-Papist. “Your holy water, purgatory, bulls,” Corbett mocks the Cath-olic priesthood,

Wherewith you make the common people gulls,Are gross abuses of fantastic brainsSubtly devis’d only for private gains.65

At the other extreme, we find the sober, uncompromising ThomasWilcox, warning that to permit the lawful circulation of “vain andidle imaginations” about Purgatory will inevitably lead to thespread of “a whole world of men’s fantasies.”66 So, too, the moremoderate divine John Veron, a French-born Protestant, ordainedin England and imprisoned for his beliefs under Mary Tudor. Ver-on’s Protestant spokesman Eutrapelus in his dialogue The Huntingof Purgatory to Death (1561) argues that the whole doctrine of Pur-gatory is the lying invention of poetry. His wavering friend Dydi-mus concedes that he had not realized “that the poets are greatliars and that their books be full of lying tales and vain fables: andalso that both they and painters, have had always license to feign,whatsoever please them.”67

An early-seventeenth-century tract spells out the Protestantcharge against the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory with painstakingexplicitness. The text, published under the pseudonym Nick-groom of the Hoby-Stable, was by Sir Edward Hoby (1560–1617),the eldest son of the great translator of Castiglione and the nephewof Queen Elizabeth’s principal adviser, Lord Burghley. Hoby is re-sponding to a defense of Purgatory by the Jesuit John Floyd:

Such is the notorious folly of your Preacher . . . that he gather-eth a Gospel out of a Poem, and that not written historically,or doctrinally, but in pathetical verse, full of Metaphors, Me-tonymies, Apostrophes, Prosopopeis, and other as well rhetor-ical figures, as Poetical flowers, which to take in a proper andof rigorous sense, is folly, to urge them as points and articles[of] faith, is such a solemn foolery, that it may seem the nextdegree to madness. He should know the difference betwixt an


Evangelist, and a Poet, a Gospel and a Poem, rigid truth, andfigurative speech, Articles of Faith, and poetical fancies.

Hoby’s work is nominally a dialogue, but in response we are givennot a defense of Catholicism and not an acknowledgment of thepervasiveness of metaphor, metonymy, apostrophe, and prosopo-poeia in Scripture but, rather, a defense of poetry: “Is not this,” acharacter objects, “to shift off their Idolatrous appeals, their mentaland imaginary petitions to the Poet’s pen?”68

At moments in the Protestant polemic the emphasis falls almostentirely on the emptiness of the fictive imagination, as if “imag-ined” were inevitably synonymous with “untrue.” Cardinal Allen’sdefenses of Purgatory, writes the acerbic Puritan controversialistWilliam Fulke in 1577, may be compared to “the arguments ofthose vain fables that were wont to be printed in English of Bevisof Hampton, Guy of Warwick, and such like, where the argumentsshow how such a Knight overcame such a Giant, how such a sor-cerer wrought such a miracle, which are rolled as confidently asthough they were true, and yet there is no man of mean wit soignorant, but he knoweth them to be feigned fantasies.” To Allen’surgent appeal—“Therefore I shall desire all Catholic readers, asthey believe this grave sentence of God to come, and fear the rodof our father’s correction, that they prevent the same, by lowlysubmitting themselves unto the chastisement of our kind motherthe Church”—Fulke sarcastically replies that it is mere rhetoric.“As for that Prosopopoeia of the mother, opposing her to the fa-ther, in word is more rhetorical than Christian in deed, and be-cause it is unfit for the matter, it is more of garrulity than of elo-quence.” The whole Catholic edifice, Fulke mocks, is an absurdpageant manned by a belligerent impostor: “Now this lusty gallantas though he had fully repaired and fortified the old ruinous andbattered towers of limbus patrum, with canvas painted walls, he stan-deth upon his bulwark of brown paper, and crieth defiance to allhis enemies.”69

A “bulwark of brown paper”: Protestants sometimes wrote as ifthe whole doctrine of Purgatory were a stage set, a will-o’-the-wisp,


a filthy spiderweb they could simply sweep away. Certainly, by thetime of Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), it had been swept away inEngland, so completely that the poet does not feel obliged to con-demn or mock it. In Milton’s cosmos, there is no purgatorial spaceat all and no conspicuous refutation of what was once such a cen-tral object of Protestant loathing. The nearest thing to an allusioncomes in the grotesque fantasy of the fate of those among thehorde of “Embryos and idiots, eremites and friars / White, blackand gray, with all their trumpery” (3:474–75),70 who hope throughsuperstitious means to pass disguised into Paradise. Just at thefoot of Heaven’s ascent, writes Milton, a violent wind sweepsthese deluded impostors off their feet and blows them into the“devious air”:

then might ye seeCowls, hoods and habits, with their wearers tossedAnd fluttered into rags, then relics, beads,Indulgences, dispenses, pardons, bulls,The sport of winds: all these upwhirled aloftFly o’er the backside of the world far offInto a limbo large and broad, since calledThe Paradise of Fools, to few unknownLong after, now unpeopled, and untrod.

(3:489–97)

The indulgences that flutter in the wind, along with all the otherrubbish, are all that remains of the elaborate cult of the dead, andwhat was once amassive, imposing realm has been transmuted intoa comic limbo.71 But this Miltonic perspective, which has shapedour own account of the past, is highly misleading. In early-six-teenth-century England, there was nothing gossamer-like aboutPurgatory. The great imaginary construction had produced highlytangible results.

Hence at othermoments, what is most startling is not the fraudu-lence of the imaginary place but its power. Tyndale’s young fol-lower John Frith writes that when he read the accounts of Purga-tory written by those “witty and learned men,” Thomas More andthe bishop of Rochester, he was struck by the fact that the accounts


did notmatch: “M. More saith, that ‘there is no water in Purgatory;’and my Lord of Rochester saith, that ‘there is water;’ Master Moresaith, that ‘the ministers of punishment are devils,’ and my Lordof Rochester saith, ‘that the ministers of the punishment areangels;’ ” and so forth. The conflicting details, Frith concludes,“mademine heart yearn and fully to consent, that this their painfulPurgatory was but a vain imagination.” The vanity (that is, the emp-tiness) of the doctrine, the fact that the great prison house is “noth-ing but man’s imagination and phantasy” and its fires a mere pieceof “poetry,”72 does not mean, however, that it is without conse-quences in the world: purgatorial fire, though a figment of theimagination, brings real gold and silver into the coffers of the Cath-olic Church.

When in 1545 and 1547, with zealous Protestantism in the as-cendant, the English Parliament acted to dissolve the whole systemof intercessory foundations created to offer prayers for souls inPurgatory, the lawmakers and bureaucrats found themselves facedwith an immense task. They had to strike at colleges, free chapels,chantries, hospitals, fraternities, brotherhoods, guilds, stipendiarypriests, and priests for terms of years, as well as at many smallerfunds left to pay for trentals (the cycle of thirty requiem masses),obits (the yearly memorial service), flowers, bells, and candles. Bri-tannia, the great survey of the realm by the antiquary William Cam-den, gives as the total number of suppressed foundations 2,374chantries and free chapels, 110 hospitals, and 90 nonuniversitycolleges, a list that modern scholars regard as a substantial under-estimation.73 It would have been a social catastrophe simply to shutdown all institutions that had been created in the attempt to pro-vide prayers for the dead.

Government commissioners struggled to separate out the reli-gious functions of such institutions, functions that they wished toban, from benefits to the community which often seemed manifestand even indispensable. It was one thing to stop the sick from pray-ing for the soul of the founder; quite another to shut down thehospital that the founder had endowed in order to acquire a long-term fund of prayers.74 In part the task was a legal one: crown law-yers had to figure out how to break a large number of wills, divert-


ing funds from their intended purpose and violating the explicitwishes of the testators. In part it was institutional: to rid itself ofPurgatory, English culture had to embark on a huge enterprise ofrecycling and reorienting. Key aspects of the community’s struc-ture had been bound up with its ongoing relationship to souls inthe afterlife. If that relationship were to be decisively broken—Protestant reformers hoped to achieve this end—then the ultimatepurpose of many significant institutions had to be reconceived andthe impulse to assist others channeled in different directions. Inpart, therefore, the task was also psychological: men and womenhad to be led to reimagine their own postmortem fate, as well asthat of their loved ones.

“I HATE DEAD NAMES”

We can observe the traces of this psychological reimagining inJohn Donne’s remarkable Devotions on Emergent Occasions (1623–1624). Lying ill, brooding on the resemblance between his sickbedand a grave, Donne tells himself that his condition is worse thandeath:

In the grave I may speak through the stones, in the voice ofmy friends, and in the accents of those words which their lovemay affordmymemory; here I ammine own ghost, and ratheraffright my beholders than instruct them; they conceive theworst of me now, and yet fear worse; they give me for deadnow, and yet wonder how I do when they wake at midnight,and ask how I do to-morrow. Miserable, and (though commonto all) inhuman posture, where I must practise my lying in thegrave by lying still, and not practise my resurrection by risingany more.75

“In the grave I may speak through the stones”: the phrase invokestales of ghostly voices surging up uncannily from the grave. It wasprecisely by means of such voices (or, more accurately, reports ofsuch voices)—along with accounts of voyages to the otherworldand the testimony of those rare individuals who died but then mi-


raculously revived—that the existence of Purgatory was affirmedagain and again throughout the later Middle Ages. The purpose ofspectral visitations was most often to plead for prayers, almsgiving,pious fasts, and above all masses, in order to obtain some relieffrom excruciating pain. Less commonly, ghosts returned, asDonne puts it, to “instruct” the living, that is, to issue warnings,disclose hidden wrongs, or urge the restitution of ill-gotten gains.

Throughout the many medieval and Renaissance accounts ofthese voices or apparitions of the dead, there is a fairly standardpattern.76 The ghost generally appears shortly after death, whilethe memory of the deceased, usually a close relative or friend ofthe living person to whom the vision manifests itself, is still fresh.Ghostly apparitions, then, are quite distinct from the persistenceof the dead through fame: hauntings are not about the dream ofoccupying a place in the memories of future generations, notabout the longing to escape from the limitations of one’s own nar-row life-world, not even about the craving for persistence that leadsmen to engrave their names on stone tablets. The spectral voice isnot for strangers; it is for those who awake at midnight and thinkabout the dead person whom they have loved, and wonder withmingled fear and hope about the fate of that person’s soul.77

But it is not exactly his own spectral voice that Donne imaginesechoing through the stones; it is the voice of his friends. And hedoes not imagine their words—“the words which their love mayafford my memory”—as the prayers that pious Catholics hopedwould relieve their sufferings in the otherworld. Rather, by lovinglyremembering him after his death, the friends will give Donne’svoice at least the semblance of continued existence in this world.Such an existence, however limited, would be preferable, Donnethinks, to his present condition, so leveled by illness that he is hisown ghost. In his friends’ minds, waking at midnight or thinkingabout him on the morrow, there is not sweet memory but fear, notgentle closure but ongoing dread.

In the universe conjured up by Donne’s Devotions, there is amplespace for Heaven, and Hell; there is even room for a plurality ofworlds; but there is no place for Purgatory. When, in the course of


a long work obsessed with death and the afterlife, a ghost makesits appearance, it is only the living Donne himself, gravely ill andhence frightening to his friends, and not the spirit of a dead manwho is being purified before rising to bliss. Themiddle place wheresuch spirits could have been found, by the millions, only a genera-tion or two earlier—and we might recall that Donne was raised asa Catholic and related bymarriage to the family of ThomasMore—has vanished. To be sure, Donne can invoke it as a metaphor; inElegy VI, he speaks of kisses he has breathed into “my purgatory,faithless thee.” But, declaring that “I hate dead names,” he goeson to warn his mistress that she is teaching him to look with “neweyes” and to fall away from his old faith: “[T]hus taught, I shall /As nations do from Rome, from thy love fall.” Such a falling awaywill, he knows, provoke anger and rejection, but he will be armedagainst their effects:

[W]hen IAm the recusant, in that resolute state,What hurts it me to be excommunicate?78

Purgatory has become nothing but a “dead name” for Donne,and he is resolute in turning away from it, as he turned away fromother aspects of Rome. Yet it leaves a ghostly trace in his writing,and not only in his sardonic reference to his mistress. In his Devo-tions he speaks of three kinds of hearts: the first, suitable to bepresented to God, are “perfect hearts; straight hearts, no per-verseness without; and clean hearts, no foulness within”; the sec-ond, suitable for the devil, are “hearts that burn like ovens,” heartsfueled by lust, envy, and ambition, Judas hearts. But there is a thirdcategory, one to which Donne himself belongs:

There is then a middle kind of hearts, not so perfect as to begiven but that the very giving mends them; not so desperateas not to be accepted but that the very accepting dignifiesthem. This is a melting heart, and a troubled heart, and awounded heart, and a broken heart, and a contrite heart;and by the powerful working of thy piercing Spirit such a heartI have.79


This “middle kind” is precisely the category assigned by Catholictradition to the souls in Purgatory.

Theologians had for centuries pondered the fate of those Chris-tians who were neither completely good nor completely bad, and,in particular, the fate of those at the brink of death burdened withsome sins for which they had not done (or had begun but not yetcompleted) the canonical penance. The sins in question were notthe gravest ones, mortal sins for which Hell was the inescapablepunishment, but lesser ones (“venial sins,” as a distinction fullyformulated in the twelfth century put it), for which, if justice wereto be satisfied, some punishment was still due.

In Donne’s analysis of his spiritual condition, he belongs neitherwith those whose hearts are perfect nor with those whose heartsare indelibly stained. Contemplating his own death, he recognizesthat he stands in urgent need of purgation. But the cleansing forwhich he hopes has no special place assigned to it in the other-world; it must happen now, in this life, through the healing powerof Jesus’ sacrifice. “Let thy spirit of true contrition and sorrow,” heprays, “pass all my sins, through these eyes, into the wounds of thySon, and I shall be clean, and my soul so much better purged thanmy body, as it is ordained for better and a longer life.”80 With thisprayer for a spiritual purging that accompanies and surpasses thephysical purging prescribed by his doctors, Donne rises from hissickbed like Lazarus from the grave. It is as if the entire Catholicvision of death, reckoning, purgation, and ascent had been com-pressed, reoriented, and forced into the drama of sickness andrecovery in this life.

“Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in man-kind,” Donne writes in the most celebrated passage of the Devo-tions, “and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls;it tolls for thee.”81 The famous image here is not historically neu-tral: the tolling of the bells in Protestant England was a subject ofcontention.82 More zealous Protestants wanted to see the customeliminated as a remnant of popery, and they had a strong case.Traditionally the bells, signaling the passing of a fellow Christian,were a call for prayers that would help speed the newly departedsoul through its purgatorial torment. Such assistance would come


most naturally from the immediate family of the deceased, butthe bells alerted and invoked the assistance of the entire congrega-tion, for all the faithful, living and dead, were bound together.The sound of the bells demarcated a geographical unit of fellowfeeling within whose limits prayers were particularly appropriate.The English church instituted restrictions on this practice, but itdid not eliminate bell ringing altogether. Donne’s image gives un-forgettable expression to the shared community of the living andthe dead. At the same time it redirects the focus: the dead are nolonger a special group imprisoned in a distant penal colony; theyare ourselves.

The principal idea, of course, has to do with participation in thehuman community: “No man is an island, entire of itself; everyman is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” But the forceof the image of the bells tolling is bound up with its uncanny impli-cation: you may not have realized it, but you are on your deathbed;indeed, youmay already be dead. Donne began his work by imagin-ing himself as his own ghost, an image he now immeasurably deep-ens. But where do these ghosts—all of us, in effect, or at least allof us who have heard the bells toll—reside? In a realm under theearth? In a special place set aside for purgation? No, here in thisworld, a world that is an enormous charnel house, where we awaitresurrection.83 “Where Lazarus had been four days,” Donne tellsGod, “I have been fifty years in this putrefaction; why dost thounot call me, as thou didst him, with a loud voice, since my soul is asdead as his body was?”84

In a strange, vivid realization of this notion, on February 25,1631, less than two months before his death, Donne preached hisfinal sermon at St. Paul’s wrapped in his shroud. “To the amaze-ment of some beholders,” wrote his biographer, Izaak Walton,Donne “presented himself not to preach mortification by a livingvoice: but, mortality by a decayed body and dying face.”85 The ser-mon, “Death’s Duell,” vividly imagines what it calls the body’s sec-ond death: “the death of corruption and putrefaction, and vermic-ulation, and incineration, and dispersion in and from the grave,in which every dead man dies over again.” As if he is already dead,


Donne politely accepts prayers for his soul, but they are almostwithout significance: “I thank him that prays for me when the belltolls, but I thank him much more that catechises me, or preachesto me, or instructs me how to live.”86 There are no ghosts, save theHoly Ghost, no suffrages, save preaching to the living. For thedying Donne there is an almost frantic hope of Heaven; there isan intense fear of Hell and a still more intense fear of putrefaction;but there is no Purgatory.

AS WE HAVE seen in the course of this chapter, the Protestantswho attacked the doctrine of Purgatory had worked out an accountof the poetics of Purgatory. They charted the ways in which cer-tain elemental human fears, longings, and fantasies were beingshaped and exploited by an intellectual elite who carefully pack-aged fraudulent, profit-making innovations as if they were ancienttraditions. In the 1626 sermon at which we glanced in the pro-logue, John Donne links humans’ love for objects of their ownmaking to the legal ruses by which clever men get around realestate restrictions and thence to Purgatory, transubstantiation, theinvention of tradition, and the diseased imagination: “For, as menare most delighted with things of their own making, their ownplanting, their own purchasing, their own building, so are thesemen therefore enamoured of Purgatory: Men that can make Arti-cles of faith of their own Traditions, (And as men to elude the lawagainst new Buildings, first build sheds, or stables, and after erecthouses there, as upon old foundations, so these men first put forthTraditions of their own, and then erect those Traditions into Arti-cles of faith, as ancient foundations of Religion) Men that makeGod himself of a piece of bread, may easily make Purgatory of aDream, and of Apparitions, and imaginary visions of sick or melan-cholic men.”87

By the nineteenth century the tangle of dream, crafty institu-tional practice, and material consequences that Donne identifiesin this extraordinary passage had hardened into the concept ofideology. But that concept, as modern thinkers have tried to de-ploy it in a wide range of cultural analyses, has been dismayingly


insensitive to the imaginative dimension that most fascinatedDonne and his contemporaries. In the Old Testament, Donne re-marks, there is no precedent for Purgatory; its foundation stonewas laid by Plato, who is the patriarch of the pagan Greek church.“The Latin Church had Patriarchs too for this Doctrine,” Donnecontinues, “though not Philosophers, yet Poets.”88 What we callideology, then, Renaissance England called poetry.

) 2 (

IMAGINING PURGATORY

WHAT IF we take the Protestant charge seriously? Not the chargeof papal venality or institutional cynicism or conspiracy to de-fraud—though of course, given the general wretchedness ofhuman beings and the size of the institution in question, there issome evidence that would support all of these accusations. Rather,what if we take seriously the charge that Purgatory was a vast pieceof poetry?

From an appropriate distance, the same could be said of all con-ceptions of the afterlife, and, for that matter, of all religions. Bythe early eighteenth century, the great Neapolitan philosopher ofhistory, Giambattista Vico, had developed this global perceptioninto what he called a “new science.” The first peoples, Vico wrote,“were poets who spoke in poetic characters.”1 What are poetic char-acters and what are the sentences in which these characters findexpression? True poetic sentences are “sentiments clothed in thegreatest passions and therefore full of sublimity and arousing won-der” (22). The ancient gods were fashioned out of such senti-ments, for in the earliest times the reasoning power of humankindwas weak, but the imagination was immensely strong. “In theworld’s childhood men were by nature sublime poets” (71).

Vico gives some thought to the hypothesis that the gods wereinvented by mortals whose aim was to cheat and defraud people,but he finds this idea unlikely. His resistance to the notion of anoriginary imposture is not motivated by sentimentality; he believes,rather, that “it was fear which created gods in the world; not fear

48 C H A P T ER T W O

awakened in men by other men, but fear awakened in men bythemselves” (120). In the first men, “whose minds were not in theleast abstract, refined, or spiritualized, because they were entirelyimmersed in the senses, buffeted by the passions, buried in thebody” (118), the pinnacle of fear and wonder was the experienceof lightning and thunder. Out of this awe-inspiring, terrifying so-matic experience, the first theological poets generated a wholemetaphysics: they “created the first divine fable, the greatest theyever created: that of Jove, king and father of men and gods, in theact of hurling the lightning bolt; an image so popular, disturbing,and instructive that its creators themselves believed in it, andfeared, revered, and worshiped it in frightful religions” (118). Thegods originate not in imposture but in credulity.

Religion in Vico’s powerful account is not invented by a groupof clever, disillusioned cynics who defraud their gullible neighborswith a fable. It is the invention of the terrorized imagination.Frightened humans create fables with marvelous poetic sublimity,sublimity so great that they believe in their own creations. Finguntsimul creduntque—Vico quotes a phrase of Tacitus: “no sooner dothey imagine than they believe.” Great poetry, the magnificent pre-cipitate of fear, serves a threefold function: it invents “sublime fa-bles suited to the popular understanding”; it perturbs to excess;and it teaches “the vulgar to act virtuously, as the poets have taughtthemselves” (117). If the theological poets induce the credulousinto believing their fictions, it is because they, the poets, have cometo believe in these fictions themselves.

For Vico, the fact that the whole enormous structure of belief isbased on universal poetic invention is not a source of disillusion-ment. Instead, it underwrites the very possibility of scientific un-derstanding. For the primacy of human invention lies at the heartof what for him is the great foundational axiom: “[T]he world ofcivil society has certainly been made by men, and . . . its principlesare therefore to be found within the modifications of our ownhuman mind” (96). There is, Vico believes, a mental languagecommon to all nations. Everywhere in the world, he observes, civilsociety manifests the same three core principles, the universalbuilding blocks of the poetic imagination and therefore of social

49I M A G I N I N G P U RG AT O RY

practice. These principles are, first, divine providence, a fable ofthe gods; second, marriage, a fable of passions moderated or re-strained; and third, burial, a fable of the decaying body and thesoul’s immortality.

This splendid intellectual edifice is light-years away from whatthe Catholics and Protestants warring over Purgatory themselvescharacterized as “snarl” and “counter-snarl.”2 Yet we can appre-hend in the Protestant charge that Purgatory was a poetic fable ananticipatory glimmer of the light that Vico was to shine. Of course,the Protestants wanted it to shine, and to shine harshly, in onedirection only: at the Catholic doctrine of the middle place of soulsand the practices that this place had generated. They would cer-tainly have found Vico’s more general claim impious. But theterms of their polemics strikingly anticipate that claim in analyzingthe centrality in doctrine and practice of the poetic imagination.

Why were people like Tyndale, Latimer, and Donne confidentthat their sharp weapon would not turn against their own beliefs?In part the answer lies in the steadfastness of their faith—and, afterall, even Vico claims exemption for Christian dogma. In part, too,it lies in the relative belatedness of Purgatory as both a place anda full-fledged doctrine. Hence its poetic inventedness was moreglaringly visible than the inventedness, say, of Heaven or of God.Above all, it lies in the absence of a clear scriptural basis not onlyfor Purgatory but also for most of the practices, including indul-gences, that were associated with it. With no biblical passages toauthorize belief, Protestants could in this one place begin the workthat Vico triumphantly universalized.

PICTURING THE AFTERLIFE

Let us accordingly focus less on doctrine than on what Vico wouldcall poetic sublimity. The sublimity in question is not that of greatliterary masterpieces, of which Dante’s Purgatorio is the supremeinstance. There are surprisingly few references to Dante, hostileor otherwise, in the controversies between Catholics and Protes-tants, and it is clear that when Frith or Tyndale charges that Purga-tory is a fable, he is not thinking of the Divine Comedy. Even if these


Protestant writers knew Dante’s work—which is unlikely—theywould not have been greatly troubled by it, for it does not dependon the reader’s belief that the poet is recounting a literal voyagethat he personally took. Rather, the massive edifice they wish todismantle is the effect of hundreds of smaller imaginative interven-tions, acts of making visible and making articulable that cumula-tively made Dante’s astonishing achievement possible. The Protes-tant polemicists of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centurieshad, in many ways, a grossly inadequate account of the poetic imag-ination, for they associated it routinely with lying, but in one re-spect at least they understood something that we often overlook.They grasped clearly that the imagination was not exclusively theinspired work of a tiny number of renowned poets, though it in-cluded that work; it was, they thought, a quality diffused, for goodor ill, throughout a very large mass of makers. They saw that it tooka sustained collective effort of the imagination to make Purgatorycentral to the institutional, material, and spiritual practices ofeveryday life.

There was, for a start, the effort of the imagination to body forth,as Shakespeare puts it, “the forms of things unknown” and to give“to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name” (A MidsummerNight’s Dream 5.1.14–17). Beginning in the late thirteenth andearly fourteenth centuries, alongside traditional images of Heavenand Hell, Purgatory itself begins to be represented in painting,principally as a subterranean cave, a boiling vat, or a dungeon, andartists start to grapple with the depiction of souls who are beingtortured and yet have some hope of redemption. In one of theearliest representations, a painted wooden panel from Aachen orCologne dated 1425, the donor and his family kneel in prayer oneither side of a flaming pit that curves back into the distance.3

Crowded into the pit are the souls of the dead, crying out in painand begging for help. Their cries are not in vain, for the psalmswhose words rise up on banners streaming from the mouths of thedonor and his wife are reaching up to the heavens from which fourangels descend, carrying attributes of the Works of Mercy: breadfor the hungry, clothing for the naked, drink for the thirsty, and abasin for the stranger, the prisoner, or the sick. At the top of the


panel, angels are holding a white cloth in which they are carryingup toward the radiant face of Jesus two small naked figures whohave been released from their torment.

This panel is not simply a representation of the attempt to shortenthe term of purgatorial imprisonment; it is an active agent in thisattempt. It formed part of an altarpiece before which the donor,the knight Werner von Palant, commissioned masses to be sungdaily, except for Tuesdays and Sundays, along with special weeklymasses in honor of the Holy Cross and of Mary, and yearly massesin honor of particularly beloved saints. The precise identity of thedonor, his wife, mother, and children, secured by the painted coatsof arms as well as the portrait likenesses, is crucially important.It is, after all, for their individual benefit and not for a generalcommunal purpose that the knight commits himself to give thechaplain the annual sum of eighteen measures of rye to performthe services. The masses are intended to help them get morequickly and less painfully onto that white cloth being carried upby the angels toward the Savior.

“Good night, sweet prince,” Horatio says, bidding farewell to thefriend who has just died, “And flights of angels sing thee to thyrest” (Hamlet 5.2.302–3).4 If depictions of the afterlife are any indi-cation, the flying of the angels here is as important as their singing.Angels in flight figure in many images of Purgatory and clearlyconstitute one of the central ways in which the faithful imaginedthat assistance would come to them in their distress. In one strikingfifteenth-century manuscript illumination to a theological tome, acapital letter D is divided in three parts by a wooden cross or T(plate 1). In the top segment a lone peasant raises a hoe or rakeabove his head and is about to bring it down onto the ground forsome purpose: whether he is working the field or digging a graveis not clear. “There is no ancient gentlemen but gardeners, ditch-ers, and gravemakers,” says the wry gravedigger in Hamlet; “theyhold up Adam’s profession” (5.1.29–31). The peasant in the illu-minated capital is practicing Adam’s profession. He swings his im-plement as if he thought the ground beneath his feet was thickand solid, but in fact he is standing on only a thin ledge, beneathwhich are two separate chambers. Each of these has a yawning Hell-


mouth within which are crowded the suffering figures of the dead,eerily looking out toward the viewer. The images are virtually iden-tical, save for a single differentiating feature: on one side an angelis hovering near the top, reaching out to one of the souls whoraises up his hands to be pulled out of the horrible mouth; on theother side a devil blocks the exit, and none of the souls has anyhope of escaping.

Illuminations with a particular bearing on Purgatory frequentlyappear in Books of Hours, the volumes, often lavish and exquisite,that contained the prayers or offices prescribed for the sevenstated times of the day allotted by the medieval church to prayer.Not surprisingly, representations of the afterlife are most oftenconjoined with the office of the dead recited at vespers, particu-larly with the prayer known as the Placebo. At times the images sim-ply depict a funeral, such as the beautiful scene painted by GerartDavid of Bruges for Edward, Lord Hastings, of a church interior:nine black-hooded monks are praying by a coffin, lit with manycandles, while other religious figures are in the surrounding choirstalls (fig. 2). But very often there are dramatic scenes of sufferingand rescue. An illumination later in the same manuscript showsangels helping redeemed souls rise up toward a golden sun in themidst of which God (wearing a crown reminiscent of a papal tiara)stretches out his hands to welcome them. The souls are depictedas naked adults, both male and female. Some are being held inthe arms of the angels; others are riding on their backs; one, awoman with very long hair, is standing erect on the angel’s out-stretched hand (plate 2).

That, of course, is the good news—these images of rescue ineffect make sense of the act of praying seven times a day—but theprayer books also feature scenes of unspeakable suffering, such asone in a Book of Hours that belonged to Philip the Fair, archdukeof Austria, that depicts the fate of those who are thrust for eternityinto the mouth of what appears to be an exceedingly unpleasantcat (fig. 3). Often these scenes of Hell differentiate among thevarious tortures inflicted forever on different types of sinners—thieves hung over flames; the envious plunged first into vats of ice

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and then into boiling water; the angry stoned by raging demons;the proud stretched on rotating wheels, and so forth.

Such differentiations in misery are carried over as well into tex-tual accounts of temporary suffering in Purgatory, but they rarelyfigure in images. For the visual arts the more pressing and difficultproblem is not to distinguish among various forms of hideous tor-


Fig. 3. Souls in Hell. Book of Hours belonging to Philip the Fair,archduke of Austria. Brit. Lib. Add. MSS 17,280, fol. 38. By permission

of the British Library.

ment in Purgatory but to distinguish between any of these and theidentical torments of Hell. As we have seen, the principal device isto reproduce the traditional imagery of Hell but to add an imageof rescue. A French manuscript of the fifteenth century (fig. 4)shows a rider on a white horse, with two companions, in the pres-ence of three skeletons. The rider holds up his right hand, as if toward off the images of death, but at best this will be only a briefdelaying action. At the right, three souls suffer the torments ofPurgatory in a vat filled with red flames. How do we know that thevat is Purgatory and not Hell? Because above the vat an angel islifting up a fortunate soul who has completed the term of suffer-ing, while below a demon thrusts his pronged fork at the burningfigures crowded into a Hell-mouth. A similar scene of a flamingcauldron, in a Spanish manuscript, shows one of the figures actu-ally struggling to climb out while mass is being said (fig. 5). Thepossibility of mitigated punishment or an outright escape is de-picted still more clearly in a scene such as one found in the Bookof Hours of Philip the Fair. In two marginal vignettes, intertwinedamong beautiful wreaths of leaves, fruits, and flowers, a cadaverous


Fig. 4. Rescue from Purgatory. French Book of Hours (Horae B. MariaeVirginis). Brit. Lib. Add. MS 11,866. By permission of the British Library.

figure of death, holding a spade and a scythe, leads away a wealthy-looking man and a well-dressed woman: such is the inevitable fateof all flesh. But on the same page, inset into the Placebo, a white-robed angel holds under one arm a naked figure whose hands areclasped in prayer; the angel’s other arm, wielding a long sword,wards off a horned devil (plate 3).


Fig. 5. Gregory conducting Mass. Note soul climbing out of cauldron.Brit. Lib. Add MS 18193: Hores de Nra Senyora Segons la Esglesia

Romana. By permission of British Library.

On many church walls and portals, sculptured motifs from thelate Middle Ages and early modern period conjoin skulls and cross-bones—the fate of the body—with the image of the soul, mostoften a young woman with long, flowing hair, half-immersed in acauldron lapped by flames, her hands clasped in prayer or her eyesraised to heaven (fig. 6). The clasped hands or raised eyes, signsin the midst of fear and danger of the hope of salvation, serve todistinguish such an image from the very similar iconography of asoul in Hell. Moreover, the figure serves to instruct the worshiperwho happens to look up at it: it simultaneously represents prayer,motivates it, increases its fervor, and explains one of its principalbenefits.

Images of purgatorial suffering fulfill a complex, multiple func-tion. They are instructions to the viewer’s imagination, guiding itto give an appropriate shape to a concept of purgation that might


Fig. 6. Soul in purgatorial flames. Church in Ragusa, Sicily.Photo: Stephen Greenblatt.

otherwise seem too abstract and theoretical to generate the properdegree of fear. That fear is at once aroused and mitigated by theprospect of rescue, and the best means of hastening that rescue isdepicted in the gesture of prayer. The representational challengeis to fashion a response distinct from the blend of horrified fascina-tion and grim satisfaction with which the viewer is ordinarily in-vited to regard the agonies of the damned or the complacent plea-sure with which the viewer is invited to regard the pious delights ofthe saved. The ultimate goal is to provoke action, the pious actionneeded to obtain the supernatural assistance figured in the angelswho lift the souls out of their suffering.

On occasion, the assistance comes from still higher powers: onthe title page of a mass book of 1521, Hans Holbein the Youngershows Christ and Mary nourishing souls in Purgatory with theirblood and milk (fig. 7). The image of Mary’s milk flowing into


Fig. 7. Christ and Mary nourishing souls in Purgatory with bloodand milk. Hans Holbein the Younger, Missale Speciale (Basel:Thomas Wolff, Marz 1521). By permission of the Houghton

Library, Harvard University.

the mouths of suffering souls was widely disseminated, especiallyaround Naples, while in the North artists tend to favor a differentrepresentation, the Mystic Mass of Saint Gregory the Great. Tradi-tionally, that image made the doctrinal point that the consecratedHost in the central Christian ritual, the Eucharist, is not merely a


representation or reminder but is miraculously transubstantiatedin Christ’s body and blood. As Saint Gregory elevates the Hostbefore an altarpiece, the figure of the bleeding Savior appears. Insome images, beginning in the fifteenth century, the blood fromhis wounds flows not only into the chalice used in the celebrationof the Mass but also into the mouths of small naked figures stand-ing near the altar.5 These figures are souls of the dead, sufferingin Purgatory, and with the divine assistance of the Mass, the soulsbegin to ascend out of the flames.

This image of upward movement is perhaps the most brilliantsolution to the representational problem posed by Purgatory, sinceit gets at a crucial way of differentiating the suffering endured foreternity by souls in Hell from that endured by souls whose termof punishment is limited. In an astonishing late-fifteenth-centurypanel by Hieronymus Bosch, now in the Doge’s Palace in Venice,we see naked souls that have been cleansed of their sins lifted byangels toward a long funnel, a kind of birth canal, at whose endfigures are emerging into a blinding light (plate 4). It was somesuch ecstatic movement that the celebrants of Mass or the piousreaders of the Books of Hours were encouraged to imagine, forthemselves and for those they loved.

“Most of the representations of Purgatory in medieval art,” onescholar has concluded, are “illustrations showing the efficacy ofintercession.”6 But the visual evidence which we have examinedcertainly also supports Vico’s general hypothesis that a primarymotive in the poetic fashioning and dissemination of religious be-lief was fear. And it is difficult, in the case of Purgatory, to ruleout a mercenary motive as well, both for the artists and for theinstitutions they served. But there were other considerations thathelped drive the enterprise. Through its teaching about Purgatory,the church mobilized an impulse of charity toward the dead thatcould be deployed throughout the lives of the living. The doctrineof suffrages confirmed the power of the Mass and of the ecclesiasti-cal hierarchy, but it also stressed communal solidarity, kindness,love, and solicitous concern for the weak and the wretched. Con-cern properly began with the fate of one’s own soul—after all,


Christians were responsible for their own individual actions—andit could end there too, but the longing for rescue extended towider circles.

Sermons and images trained people to imagine in vivid detailthe miseries of suffering souls, and the church then offered waysto transform empathic identification into generous action. Manyof these ways involved religious rituals, but they also included almsto the poor, subsidized education, hospitals for the sick, assistancein giving the indigent a proper burial. A Middle English poem,“The Relief of Souls in Purgatory,” in a fifteenth-century devo-tional compilation is accompanied by a drawing showing soulsbeing pulled out of the purgatorial flames in a bucket. The bucketis drawn by a thick rope that passes through a pulley at the en-trance of Heaven and then back down to the earth where it ispulled by a group of priests who are saying Mass at an altar. Thedrawing, in a manuscript possibly executed for the private use ofa Carthusian monk, thus celebrates the power of ritual. But therope continues past the altar and reaches an individual, evidentlya layman, who is giving alms to two poor people, one of whom hasan artificial leg.7

There was a high cost to all of this, as Protestant reformers indig-nantly charged: a large clerical hierarchy in the service of the cultof the dead, a steady flow of money into the hands of these soul-specialists, a flowering of religious practices that many figures inthe Catholic Church itself regarded as superstitious, and a morbidinfusion of death into all aspects of community life. Above all, po-lemicists tried to discredit the charitable impulse by claiming thatthe only real beneficiary was the pope. “Purgatory brings Romemore gold a day,” goes a satirical jingle from the 1570s, “Than twohorse well loaden will carry away.”8 And what does the pope do inexchange for all of this gold? Nothing. “The pope is kin to RobinGoodfellow,” Tyndale remarks wryly, “which sweepeth the house,washeth the dishes, and purgeth all, by night; but when day com-eth, there is nothing found clean.”9 For, as we have seen, the re-formers argue that the whole Catholic mortuary kingdom is afraud, built around a mere fantasy. “I am wont to call a dream adream,” says one of the characters in Veron’s dialogue The Hunting


of Purgatory to Death; “For, where have they learned those lying tales,and vain fables, that they have preached unto us?”10

Protestants struggled therefore to undo the purgatorial imagina-tion. Only by taking the great fable apart, piece by piece, couldthey hope to liberate people from it. Only by exposing it as a fablecould they get the faithful to conquer slavish credulity or at leastredirect the most compelling feelings that the cult of Purgatoryhad deliberately aroused and braided together: hope and fear. Theeasiest part of the task was to destroy the images: manuscripts weretorn up, altarpieces were disassembled and burned, sculpted im-ages of souls praying in the flames were smashed. Or if the imageswere not destroyed, they were detached gently or violently fromtheir original meaning. All over England, set into the floors ofchurches, are exquisite monumental brasses still intact, but withthe prayer for the donor’s soul carefully chiseled away.

Images are vivid but vulnerable. The harder part of the zealots’task was to chisel away a set of powerful stories, for it was in narra-tive even more than in pictures that the purgatorial poem was cre-ated and maintained.

PRISON HOUSE AND THEATER

Souls were imprisoned in Purgatory for a purpose: to be readiedfor bliss. It was possible, at least in principle, to emphasize thepositive outcome and to conjure up a state of being very close tothe joys of Paradise. Hence, for example, in the mid-twelfth-cen-tury Vision of Tondal (or Tnugdal) written in Latin in the south Ger-man city of Regensburg by an Irish monk, a description of thehorrific torments suffered by the damned in Hell is followed by avery different account of two adjacent abodes. Neither of theseabodes is explicitly designated as Purgatory—evidently the work’sauthor, Brother Marcus, was unaware of the term—but their func-tion is closely related to that formalized shortly afterward in churchdoctrine and repeatedly explored in narrative.11

Tondal, a dissolute young layman who has collapsed into uncon-sciousness and whose soul has been granted a vision of the afterlife,is relieved when the stench, screaming, and darkness of Hell give


way to a more endurable sight. By an extremely high wall he seesa multitude of men and women, hungry and thirsty, standing ex-posed to wind and rain. In comparison with what he has just wit-nessed and in part endured—souls beaten, burned, and mutilated;others raped and devoured by monsters; still others (male and fe-male alike) howling as they give birth to snakes—the suffering ofthose by the high wall seems light. Tondal asks his angelic guidewho they are. “These are the wicked,” the angel answers, “but notvery.” “They have indeed applied themselves to lead a rigorous andvirtuous life,” he explains, “but they did not give worldly goodsgenerously to the poor as was their duty, and this is why they havemerited to suffer the rain for some years, after which they will bebrought to a good resting place.”12

The next abode, reached by a door that opens to them of itsown accord, is a still happier vision: a fragrant, flowery meadowfilled with joyous souls resting by the fountain of life. Tondal shoutsin delight, thinking that he is in Heaven, but the angel correctshim: “The people who dwell here are not totally good: they havebeen spared the tortures of Hell but do not yet merit to be unitedto the communion of saints.”13 Purgation, in this account, is a pe-riod of waiting, at best in something like Provencal spring, at worstin the equivalent of a blustery season in Dublin.

This vivid account does not depend upon illustrations and forthe most part circulated throughout Europe without any, but as ithappens, a manuscript of The Vision of Tondal, commissioned byMargaret of York, duchess of Burgundy, has miniatures by one ofthe great Flemish illuminators of the fifteenth century, Simon Mar-mion of Valenciennes. In Marmion’s first miniature, Tondal, amodel of elegance in his peach-colored velvet robe and his goldchain, reaches out for some food at the dinner table, when hesuddenly suffers a seizure (plate 5). We next see him laid out onthe floor, as if dead, surrounded by a crowd of grieving witnesses,while in the air, visible to us but not to these witnesses, wingeddemons are coming for his soul. In the following miniature, every-thing has changed: the room has disappeared, along with all of theyoung man’s rich clothes, from his soft cap to his pointed-toeshoes, and Tondal’s soul stands completely naked before the ap-


Fig. 8. Tondal and Guardian Angel. Simon Marmion(illuminator), Les Visions du chevalier Tondal (1475), fol. 11v.

The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

proaching fiends. Naked but not alone: he is accompanied andprotected by a beautiful, golden-haired angel arrayed in a longpurple robe (fig. 8). Marmion emphasizes these clothes asclothes—the robe, from which the angel’s altogether human headand hands emerge, is fastened at the neck by a small gold pin—and at the same time emphasizes their symbolic status by depictingthe angel’s wings as identical to them in color and substance. Thatis, clothing in the afterlife is a sign of angelic virtue and power, justas nakedness is a sign of human vulnerability.

The subsequent miniatures make manifest the consequences ofthis vulnerability with a series of unforgettably vivid depictions ofthe unspeakable torments to which souls in Hell are subjected.


Fig. 9. The Good But Not Totally Good. Simon Marmion(illuminator), Les Visions du chevalier Tondal (1475), fol. 34v.

The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

Indeed, at one point Marmion, for the most part extremely faith-ful to his text, transforms a description of two devils stuck intothe cavernous mouth of a horrible beast into an image of the infer-nal suffering of two miserable humans (plate 6). But the toneand imagery shift dramatically when Tondal is led by his angelicguide to the place of purgation. In one of the illuminations, theangel shows the naked Tondal the wall in which the “wicked butnot very” are standing exposed in niches; in another, he pointsthrough an archway to the meadow where the good but not to-tally good disport themselves around the fountain of life (plate 7

and fig. 9).But in both medieval theology and popular literature such rela-

tively mild, even blissful representations of the intermediate zonebetween Hell and Heaven are rare. Far more common is the night-


marish landscape of fire, snow, and stinking water, vividly depictedin a characteristic passage from a late-twelfth-century text, re-counting a vision that a monk of Evesham, who had fallen into acoma, reported upon returning to consciousness:

The region of the above-mentioned valley, and the sides ofboth mountains, which bore this dreadful appearance of heatand cold, were occupied by a crowd of spirits, as numerous asbees at the time of swarming; and their punishment in generalwas at one time to be dipped in the fetid lake; at another,breaking forth from thence, they were devoured by the vol-umes of flame which met them, and at length, in fluctuatingballs of fire, as if sparks from a furnace, were tossed on highand fell to the bottom of the other bank; they were again re-stored to the whirlings of the winds, the cold of the snow, andthe asperity of the hail; then, thrown forth from thence, as ifflying from the violence of the storms, they were again thrustback into the stench of the lake, and the burnings of the rag-ing fire. . . . Of all those then who were there tortured, thecondition was this, that for the fulfillment of their purifica-tion, they were compelled to pass through the whole surfaceof that lake from the beginning to the end.

“For the fulfillment of their purification”: at moments the processis figured as a kind of ghastly stain-removal, as if the souls werebeing fed into an enormous washing machine, complete with caus-tic cleansing solutions and alternating cycles of heat and cold. Atother moments it is figured simply as torture in a monstrous penalcolony:

Some were roasted before fire; others were fried in pans; redhot nails were driven into some to their bones; others weretortured with a horrid stench in baths of pitch and sulfur,mixed with molten lead, brass, and other kinds of metal; im-mense worms with poisonous teeth gnawed some; others, inthick ranks, were transfixed on stakes with fiery thorns; thetorturers tore them with their nails, flogged them with dread-ful scourges, and lacerated them in dreadful agonies.14


This is, let us reiterate, the good news. These are souls destinedfor Heaven, but they cannot enter its sacred precincts with theburden of even relatively minor sins upon them. Why did God’ssacrifice of his own Son not suffice to clean the slate of eachsoul? Because that sacrifice did not erase individual moral respon-sibility. If all actions are significant, the argument goes, if virtuousactions are always rewarded and vicious actions punished, if indi-viduals are accountable for their own behavior, then the principleof retributive justice absolutely required that each and everysin, no matter how small, be counted, weighed, and punished. Godin this very familiar picture was the supreme judge in a heavenlycourt.

The invocation of the court of heavenly justice was closely linkedto the image of Purgatory as a prison, where, for an appropriateperiod of time and with a precisely calibrated intensity, punish-ments would be meted out for sins that had not been fully erasedin this life through penitence, fasting, alms, prayer, confession,masses, and other good works. In theory all punishments duringthe soul’s incarceration were various degrees of separation fromwhat was called the Beatific Vision: access to the divine presencefor which the imprisoned soul longs and to which it would ulti-mately rise. But in practice—that is, in the imaginative conceptionfostered in images and stories—the imprisoned soul was a malefac-tor, a petty criminal perhaps (serious crimes being punished inHell) or an improvident debtor, who would be subjected to themost hideous tortures that an unrestrained punitive intelligencecould devise. Only when the debt to the divine creditor was fullypaid would the soul be released and allowed to go to its destinedhome.

In keeping with their exemplary nature, the tortures inflictedupon souls in both Purgatory and Hell generally have a theatricalcharacter, as at least one medieval vision of the afterlife rendersexplicit. In the early-thirteenth-century Visio Thurkilli, the peasantThurkill is led in spirit by Saint Julian into the otherworld, wherethey are joined by Saint Domninus. There they encounter a fiendwho tells them that, as it is Saturday evening, he is hurrying to


“our theatrical games” (ludis nostris theatralibus).15 When the saintsexpress their desire to attend these games, the fiend consents butwarns them not to bring the peasant, lest he “disclose our secretsto his friends, and thus hinder our work upon earth, and save somefrom the seats that are even now prepared for them.”16 Julian andDomninus nonetheless manage to bring Thurkill with them, hid-ing him between them. The theater, a “huge round building(domus amplissima) enclosed with dark and antique walls,” has ineffect a two-tier seating arrangement: innumerable souls of eithersex sit on round seats (sedes) in cages full of red-hot iron spikesturned inward; above them, on seats fixed into the walls, sit grin-ning fiends eager for the merry spectacle to begin.

When all of the spectators are assembled, the Prince of the ac-cursed calls out the various sinners who are brought out of theircages one by one and made to perform. Hence, for example, theproud man is dragged out of his seat and brought onto the stagewhere “in his filthy robes of black he makes a display of all hisvanity”:

He stiffens up his neck, tosses his chin, arches his brows, looksaskance, shrugs his shoulders, and struts about on tiptoe. TheFiends shriek with laughter. Then his breast swells, his cheeksglow, his eyes sparkle, and striking his nose with his finger hethreatens mighty things. Presently, with an air of fashion, hedraws out a needle, and loops up his hanging sleeves. But thenhis clothes burst into flame, and his whole body is set on fire.Fiends whirl around him, tearing him with red hot hooks andprongs: and one of them keeps drenching him with pitch andgrease, and at every drench his limbs hiss and crackle, like afrying-pan when cold water is dropped in it.17

The demonic guide helpfully explains to the saints that this last isthe worst of his torments. Then, piecing the victim’s torn bodytogether and nailing it down upon his seat again, the fiends pro-ceed to the succeeding shows—a priest who has neglected hisflock, a knight who has spent his life in slaughters and robberies,a corrupt judge, and so forth.


THE CULT OF FEAR

An alternative image-cluster emerged from the conception ofHeaven not as a law court but as a place of exceptional purity, apalace, for example, with perfectly polished floors or a sublimelybeautiful garden. No one stained with excrement and clad in filthyrags could be allowed into a place so exquisite: such a personwould first have to be scrubbed clean and given fresh clothing.Unfortunately, the scrubbing would be unpleasant, or, rather, ordi-nary scrubbing would not suffice: only cutting, freezing, or burn-ing could remove the residual pollution left by sin. And the princi-pal cleansing agent, fire, would be excruciatingly painful, “moreterrible,” as Augustine put it, “than anything that a man can sufferin this life.”18 The formulation became standard and was endlesslyreiterated, with the precise nature of the principal torture de-scribed in vivid detail by theologians and preachers.

The pain of purgatorial fire, according to a Middle English hom-iletical work, is so great

that all torments sharp and fellthat all martyrs han [have] suffered here,and pains that women when they swellof childing thole [endure] that to death are near,to that pine is not to tellbut as a bathe of water clear.19

“Of all the torments which can be suffered,” warns an EnglishJesuit of the mid–seventeenth century, James Mumford, in thesame vein,

none is more painful than those of fire, and perhaps all theother torments which our world hath, can scarce so bitterlytorture a poor creature, as it would be tortured, if it were possi-bly [sic] for it to be kept without consuming in the midst ofthe merciless flames of a glass furnace, the fire of which wouldsoon as it were penetrate itself with the very inmost parts ofthat afflicted wretch; his bones would glow like red hot barsof iron, his marrow would scorch him more fiercely than


melted lead, his blood would boil more furiously than high-seething oil, his nails, his teeth, his gristles, his very skull wouldbe like plates of bright flaming brass all on burning fire.20

Terrible as it is, Mumford adds, this earthly fire is as nothing—“a kind of painted fire”—compared to the scorching flames ofPurgatory.21

Representation and reality, here and elsewhere in the literatureof Purgatory, exchange positions. The terrible fire was in principleintended to be a convenient image, drawn from ordinary life, ofthe suffering that a redeemed soul would experience after thedeath of the body, during the cleansing period in which it wasdeprived of the vision of God. But the image of bodies in flames ismore vivid, more intuitively graspable, and more frightening thanthe abstract notion of a deprivation or absence. Hence, in sermonsand homilies, the imagery becomes increasingly elaborate, de-manding ever more attention, until the notion of the Beatific Vi-sion shrinks to near-invisibility. The fire ceases to be a figure forwhat the preacher understands cannot be represented and insteadbecomes what he insists is the actual experience of the otherworld:not an image at all, therefore, but a reality—the reality—next towhich our actual physical experience of being burned (the mostintense pain that most of us endure in the ordinary course of life)is mere representation.

The rhetorical strategy here is not without its risk, for it is obvi-ously the church’s fire, the fire of Purgatory, that is “painted” (bothin words and in the actual paintings that adorned the walls): itwould seem rash virtually to call attention to the fact that the han-dle of a frying pan, imprudently grasped, can inflict more agonythan mortals have ever directly known of the whole vast punitivemachinery of the afterlife. But writers like Mumford repeatedlytake this risk in part to challenge doubt precisely where it is mostlikely to arise and in part to produce the somatic effect that inter-ests them: not the actual agony of being burned but sickeningdread of what might come. Though some churchmen clearly feltthat the dread was better aroused through menacing vagueness—talk of what was forbidden or simply too horrible to be disclosed


to mortal ears—than through such overly explicit imagery as glassfurnaces and scorched marrow, the general goals over a long pe-riod of time remained constant: to undermine psychological secu-rity, to prevent any serene contemplation of one’s own death orthat of one’s loved ones, to make the stomach churn and the hairstand on end, to provoke fear.

How long could an ordinary person—not so wicked as to deserveHell but not so preternaturally virtuous as to ascend directly toHeaven—expect to suffer these horrors? One Spanish theologiancalculated that an average Christian would have to spend aroundone to two thousand years in Purgatory.22 An Italian preacher de-clares that he cannot guess how much time is allotted to his audi-ence’s dead friends and relations, but their prospects are bleak.After all, he points out, Pope Sixtus V granted an indulgence of11,000 years for the reciting of a certain prayer at Notre-Dame;Gregory XIII conceded 74,000 years to the members of the Con-fraternity of the Rosary.23

What could be done? One answer was to choose Purgatory inthis life. As the pain of mere flesh was supposed to be infinitelypreferable to the agony suffered by the strange virtual body (simili-tudo corporis) of the soul, and as God was graciously willing to acceptthe pain of the flesh in place of the pain of the soul, the faithfulcould elect penance or ardently hope for suffering in this life as away to lessen the reckoning that would ultimately and inevitablyhave to be paid.24 “And he that does a sinful deed,” goes the CursorMundi, a fourteenth-century Northumbrian poem,

Of heavy penance has he need.For it is better here for to mendThan in the cleansing fire be brend.25

Heavy penance, and for that matter ordinary suffering, in this lifecould in effect do the beneficial work of purgatorial fire at a muchreduced level of pain. As Thomas Tuke puts it, reducing severalcenturies of complex meditation to a simple formula, “He thatdies, while he lives, lives whiles he is dead.”26 In consequence, apious person should pray, in the words of the fifteenth-century


mystic Richard Rolle, “Grant me, lord Jesu, Purgatory for my sinsere I die.”27

For many Protestant critics, such prayers were contemptible, aswas the prudential calculation that lay behind them: “Consider theslavish fear,” writes Henry Jones in the mid–seventeenth century,“into which by the Popish Doctrine of Purgatory, the world hadbeen brought; with fear whereof many have all their lives long beenheld in bondage: being told that all the sorrows in this life, labors,want, banishments, prisons, shame, miseries, calamities, wounds,nay death itself, are nothing to the pains of Purgatory.”28 But inRolle’s traditional and widely shared view, terror of the purgationthat lies ahead is an essential agent of moral restraint as well as aninducement to the pious acceptance of tribulation.29

From this perspective—a perspective familiar from innumerablepaintings, carved capitals, and mosaics still visible on the walls ofmedieval and Renaissance churches—fear was a gift to be assidu-ously cultivated.30 The discourse of Purgatory was meant not onlyto manage, contain, and ultimately relieve anxiety; it was explicitlymeant to arouse it, to sharpen its intensity, to provide it with hid-eous imagery. “Among all the Passions of the mind,” writes a seven-teenth-century recusant Catholic, Jane Owen, “there is not any,which hath so great a sovereignty, and command over man, as thePassion of Fear.” It is for this reason, she writes, that she has in-structed the printer to include at the bottom of every page of herbook, An Antidote Against Purgatory (1634), the ominous wordsfrom Matthew: “Thou shalt not go out from thence, till thou repaythe last Farthing.”31

It is not an accident that the words Owen quotes are monetaryas well as monitory. She writes not simply for the faithful but forthe faithful who have enough wealth to protect themselves fromthe worst consequences of their venial sins by acquiring the favor-able intercession of souls whom their charitable contributionshave helped to reach Heaven. “O how many peculiar Advocates andIntercessours of the then most blessed Soules (released out of Purga-tory) might a rich Catholike purchase to himselfe,” she writes, urg-ing almsgiving and other means of assisting the dead, “thereby to


pleade his cause before the Throne of Almighty God, in his great-est need.”32 Owen’s particular concern is that wealthy parents maybe foolish enough to give everything to their children at the ex-pense of their own souls; it is, she warns, crucial to make thoseexpenditures that will save one from purgatorial torture even ifthose expenditures mean doing less for one’s heirs: “Let your ownSouls (which are more near to you, than any Children) HAVE AT

LEAST A Child’s Portion.”33

To encourage her readers to lay out, as she puts it, “a greatpart of your riches to spiritual usury (as I may term it) for thegood of your Souls,” she rehearses four basic principles devised toarouse the appropriate level of anticipatory dread: first, the painsof Purgatory are more intense than any pains experienced inthis life; second, the pains of Purgatory for the most part endurelonger than any pains can endure in this life; third, the souls inPurgatory cannot help or bring ease to themselves; and fourth,the souls in Purgatory are almost infinite in number. To these prin-ciples, which, as Owen acknowledges, may be found in CardinalBellarmine and other Continental sources, she adds a specificallyEnglish argument drawn unexpectedly from Shakespeare’s 1Henry IV:

Sir Iohn Oldcastle being exprobated of his Cowardliness, andthereby reputed inglorious, replied; If through my pursuit ofHonour, I shall fortune to loose an Arm, or a Leg in the wars, canHonour restore to me my lost Arm, or leg? In like manner I heresay to you, Catholic: Can your Riches, your worldly pomp andpleasures, or antiquity of your House, and Family redeem yourSouls out of Purgatory? Or can this poor weak blast of wind orair, which you call your reputation (consisting in other men’swords, passed upon you) cool the heat of those burningflames?”34

This strange allusion to Falstaff—remembered by his original stagename, before Shakespeare was compelled to change it in defer-ence to the descendants of the Lollard martyr—is an attempt toawaken fear of the afterlife where it is most mooted, in the skepti-cal, antiheroic credo of the fat knight.35 Sensing perhaps that this


is an unpromising line of reasoning, Jane Owen generally sticks tomore familiar ground, the testimony of those “eyewitnesses” likeTondal who have died and then, at God’s bidding, have revived orwho have otherwise been enabled to tour Purgatory for themselvesand report on what they have seen to a world that would otherwisehave remained skeptical or indifferent.36

EYEWITNESSES OF THE AFTERLIFE

The earliest of these eyewitnesses is a pious English layman, Drih-thelm, whose vision of the purgatorial beyond in the year 696 isrelated in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of England (before 735). Manyof the elements that recur centuries later in accounts of Purga-tory—the infernal valley with its merciless flames and its blindingsnowstorms, the hideous stench, the screams of the torturedsouls—are already present in Bede’s account, along with the an-gelic guide who explains to Drihthelm that he is not, as he thinks,in Hell but rather in a realm where souls are readied to enter theKingdom of Heaven. The realm, however, is not yet specificallycalled Purgatory, and it is not a single place. As is still the case inthe Vision of Tondal, more than four hundred years later, purgationis sharply bifurcated: the souls of the not-entirely-bad (the wickedwho repented their sins in time) are tormented by devils, while onthe other side of a high wall the souls of the not-entirely-good restin a bright, sweet-smelling flowery meadow. The formal designa-tion of a third place called Purgatory, situated between Hell andHeaven and devoted to the painful, gradual, and progressive purg-ing of souls destined for bliss, does not occur until the late twelfthcentury in the reports of other eyewitnesses to the nature of theafterlife.

The most important of these, for the Middle Ages, is the knightOwein, who is the first named visitor to a place specifically calledPurgatory. The numerous vernacular accounts of the adventuresof “Owein Miles” (Owein is a variant of Ywain, the name of a knightof the Round Table whose tribulations constitute a kind of Purga-tory on earth)37 all derive from the Latin prose treatise Saint Pat-rick’s Purgatory (Tractatus de Purgatorio Sancti Patricii), written in


the early 1180s by the Anglo-Norman monk H. of Sawtry in Hun-tingdonshire.38 Henry (as subsequent chroniclers dub him, for nogood reason) explains that he was asked to write the story by afellow Cistercian, the abbot of Sartis, and that he first heard it fromanother monk, Gilbert, who had been sent to Ireland in order tolocate a site on which to found a monastery. Since Gilbert did notspeak Gaelic, he took with him as interpreter and bodyguard theknight Owein, and it was Owein who directly recounted to him thestory of his adventures in Purgatory.

Saint Patrick’s Purgatory, then, surrounds the vision with a net-work of names—H. of Sawtry, the abbot of Sartis, the monk Gilbert,Abbot Gervase (who sent Gilbert into Ireland)—names that serveto authenticate the eyewitness account and set it in the context of alarger community among whom the narrative has been circulating.Here, as in other early visionary accounts of the afterlife, directtestimony is evidently less prized than an authorizing medium oftransmission. Drihthelm, the English layman who died and thenmiraculously came back to life, does not directly record what hesaw; rather, the Venerable Bede tells his story. Tondal’s vision isrecounted by Brother Marcus, in response to the request of anabbess, “Lady G.” The monk of Evesham’s account is in the firstperson, but the chroniclers who include it make clear that we arebeing given what, “with incessant tears and groans,” he only reluc-tantly told his fellow monks, who had urgently entreated him torelate for their edification what he had seen.

“The order of ideas must follow the order of institutions” (78),goes one of Vico’s canniest aphorisms about the metaphysicalimagination. The key institutions in the case of Purgatory were themonasteries, and in particular the houses of the Anglo-NormanAugustinian canons and Cistercians who generated the story ofOwein and set it in motion, making copies of Saint Patrick’s Purga-tory and urging preaching friars to cite it in their sermons.39 TheCistercians had only recently established a substantial presencein Ireland, and it was obviously in their interest to lay claim tothe possession and control of an entrance, perhaps the only en-trance on earth accessible to mortals, to the otherworld.40 But theclaim was only as good as the belief that was invested in it, a belief


that depended not on a doctrinal argument about the necessity ofpurgation in the afterlife—that argument had been made in avariety of ways at least from the time of Augustine—but rather onthe credit accorded a particular narrative about a specific placeand a specific repertoire of experiences to be had there. Thoughcredit presumably ran high within the order itself (assuming forthe moment that the monks were not joined together in a cynicalconspiracy), the claim obviously depended on its ability to extendbeyond the confines of the monastic community. But how was be-lief generated outside the group whose interests it clearly served?How were people not in the immediate orbit of the monasteriesinduced to credit what they did not and, in the nature of things,could not see?

The answer depends in part on the stunning mobility of texts, amobility enhanced by vernacular translations. In addition to the150 surviving manuscripts of the Latin original, there are an equalnumber of copies in translation, diffused throughout Europe fromMadrid to Cracow, Edinburgh to Rome.41 This remarkable diffu-sion has led understandably to the claim, often reiterated, that H.of Sawtry’s account was “one of the best-sellers of the MiddleAges,”42 but perhaps the language of the modern book trade is notaltogether appropriate here. It is quite possible that broad circula-tion of the visions at Saint Patrick’s Purgatory, like the comparablecirculation of Mandeville’s Travels or Columbus’s first letter, repre-sents a response to widespread curiosity. But the Latin Saint Pat-rick’s Purgatory and its many translations are closely linked to aninstitutional program, and they seem to be addressed less to thecurious than to those who doubt the very existence of the placedescribed.

THE KNIGHT’S ADVENTURE

The Middle English translations, the most famous of which isOwayne Miles—a version in rhymed six-line stanzas in the early-four-teenth-century Auchinleck MS—generally begin with Saint Pat-rick’s discovery of the entrance to Purgatory at Lough Derg, incounty Donegal, a discovery that is an implicit response to the


problem of innovation and an explicit response to the problem ofskepticism. The Cistercians, in this account, were not inventing anentrance to the otherworld; they were guarding a holy site thathad been known for centuries. The skepticism that might be ex-pected to greet such a claim—for there is no philological evidenceprior to the time that Saint Patrick’s Purgatory was composed thatPurgatory as a specific geographical location was thought to exist,let alone that its entrance could be found in Donegal43—is coun-tered by being displaced back to the time of Saint Patrick. Purga-tory here does not emerge from a mist of popular credulity andonly later, in enlightened times, encounters disbelief. It is explicitlyasserted in the face of contemptuous ridicule. The heathen Irishfind the missionary saint’s account of the afterlife quite simply un-believable: “They no held it but ribaldry / Of nothing that he said”(stanza 2, lines 5–6). In Raphael Holinshed’s late-sixteenth-cen-tury rehearsal of the legend, in his Irish Chronicles, the skepticalauditors declare flatly, “[W]e dislike not of our liberty.” They arenot, they tell the saint, inclined to believe “gugawes and estrangedreams.”44 Similarly, in Calderon de la Barca’s play El purgatorio deSan Patricio (ca. 1634), the Irish king Egerio refuses to credit thevision reported by his daughter, who has revived from an apparentdeath. The vision, the king maintains, is simply an “encanto,” an“hechizo,” a deceiving “apariencia” designed to lure the credulousinto conversion.45

Purgatory is haunted, from its origin and then repeatedly in theretellings, with the specter of disbelief, the suspicion that thewhole thing is an illusion, a trick, a fiction. In many of the versions,the doubt (which is aroused by Saint Patrick’s preaching not ofHeaven and Hell—these are assumed to exist—but only of Purga-tory) is accompanied by a proposal or challenge:

And then he preached of Purgatory,As he found in his storyBut yet the folk of this countryBelieved not that it might be,And said, but if it were so,


That any man might himself goAnd see all that and come again,Then would they believe fayn [willingly].46

Distressed by this response, Patrick goes to pray in church and fallsasleep before the altar. He dreams that Jesus comes to him, giveshim a strange book that “speaketh of all manner godspelle [theGospels], / Of heaven and earth and of Hell, / Of God’s privity[secrets]” (stanza 9, lines 4–6), and leads him into a great desert toa grisly hole, round and black. Patrick is frightened “in his sleep-ing,” but Jesus tells him that this is a place for penance: should aperson venture down into the hole, steadfast in belief, he wouldhave to suffer there for only a night and a day and would then beforgiven his sins, thus avoiding the terrible punishments thatwould otherwise be due to him.

It is part of the peculiar imaginative daring of medieval texts toanswer an ontological challenge with a dream, as if the charge offantasy could be met only on fantasy’s own ground. The dreamvision serves as a kind of transition between the fictive realm towhich the saint’s auditors assign his preaching and the reality uponwhich he insists. This reality begins to assert itself—to harden intothe solidity of the material world—when, on awakening, Patrickfinds himself in possession of the book of which he has dreamed,a book whose revelation of “God’s privity” lies beyond human cre-ation: “there is no clerk that such can write, / Nor never no shallbe” (stanza 9, lines 2–3). Furnished with this token of the truth,along with a staff about which he has also dreamed, the saint ven-tures forth to find the hole. In the earliest English text to mentionSaint Patrick’s Purgatory, The South English Legendary (late-thir-teenth-century), he actually appears to create the entrance to Pur-gatory by tracing it with the staff.47 In other texts, he simply locatesthe site. In all versions, however, he proceeds to establish an abbeythere, providing an architectural setting for the revelation: at theeast end is situated the black hole, “with good stone wall allabouten, / With lock and key the gate to locken” (stanza 23, lines4–5). The lock and key signal that the setting is institutional as well


as architectural, with the entrance to Purgatory controlled by thewhite-robed monks of the abbey and ultimately by the whole cleri-cal hierarchy.

To this place comes Owein, a knight of Northumberland,48 eagerto repent his sins and determined, against the solemn warnings ofthe bishop of Ireland, to venture into “Patrickes Purgatorie.” Thewarnings are part of a preparatory ritual that serves to make de-scent into the hole seem like a solemn, spiritually meaningful deci-sion, not a rash act. Only after a fifteen-day period of ritual “afflic-tion,” fasting, and prayer is the knight brought, in a processionwith cross and banners, to the hole and told that he will find, belowthe ground, a hall of stone lit with a wintry light. The emphasison spiritual discipline, as distinct from ordinary martial courage,continues even when Owein passes through the gate, heads norththrough the “great field,” and reaches the hall. His first encounteris not with the demons of the underworld but rather with thirteenwise men clad in white whose leader counsels him to keep Godin his heart, think upon his wounds, and invoke his high name.Only when these wise men leave does the knight, his dread height-ened by an earsplitting noise, see the first of the devils, fifty scoreof them with hideous grinning faces on their backsides as well astheir heads.

The peculiar jauntiness of these fiends—who proclaim that theknight has come “To fetch him the joy of Hell / Withouten anyending” (54.5–6)—is not a form of comic relief; rather, like thegrimacing faces in Bosch’s powerful, singularly anti-Semitic paint-ing of the mocking of Christ, their taunts are set against a sobrietythat serves as a sign of spiritual maturity. (We might note that “sad-ness,” even in Renaissance English, had the force of “sincerity” or“seriousness.”) In a work that sets out to establish the existenceof Purgatory in the face of skepticism and disbelief, mockery isrepeatedly marked out as demonic.49 “Welcome, Owein!” the “mas-ter-fiend” cries in mock hospitality, “Nor haddest thou never moremischance / Than thou shall have in our dance, / When we shallplay begin” (56.3; 56.4–6). The devils offer to spare him sufferingif he follows their advice and turns back, but he refuses and callsupon God, whereupon he is led into “an uncouth land.”


The geographical description that follows derives from the toursof Hell familiar from the second-century Apocalypse of Saint Peter,the third-century Apocalypse of Saint Paul, and other ancient textsin the Christian tradition, texts closely related to both Jewish andclassical sources.50 Through a treeless landscape blows an icy wind,carrying the sounds of screaming. Owein heads north, the tradi-tional direction of Satan’s realm, through a serious of discontinu-ous valleys and fields, past a mountain “red as blood,” a filthy, stink-ing river, a sinister castle filled with torture chambers and fierypits.51 In some versions of the story he quite understandably mis-takes the place he is in for Hell: “Then wende [thought] the knighthe had found / The deepest pit in Hell-ground” (64.1–2). Hismistake is corrected, but there is little or no difference betweenthe landscape of Purgatory and the landscape of Hell:

He saw there lay full a fieldOf men and women that were aqueled [destroyed],Naked with many a wound,Toward the earth they lay deueling [groveling],“Allas! Allas!” was their brocking [complaint],With iron bands y-bound;

And began to screech and to wail,And cried, “Allas! Mercy, mercy!Mercy, God almight!”Mercy was there none, forsooth,But sorrow of heart and grinding of tooth:That was a grisly sight.

(65–66)

These are the tortures of the slothful, and the grisly sights con-tinue, with unrelenting ferocity, through the fields of the gluttons(bitten by toads, snakes, and dragons), the lechers (torn with burn-ing hooks and hanged), the backbiters (grilled on gridirons), theavaricious (broken on a flaming wheel), the usurers (boiled inmolten metal), and all the others, many fixed to the ground byred-hot nails driven through their feet, hands, and head, who arepenned up within the horrible place.


Initially, though the spectacle of so much pain grieves and fright-ens him, Owein is simply a wondering observer of a succession ofnew sights and sounds, and his role of eyewitness (and ear-witness)remains crucial throughout the work: “He heard screech andgrede [cry out]” (64.6); “There he saw sorrow more” (68.6); “Andsaw where a wheel trent [turned], / That grisly were of sight” (83.2–3); “he nor had never seen before / Haluendel [half the amount of]the care” (98.2–3); “He nor saw never ere none such” (96.3). Butthe demons have already begun to threaten him—“Thou hast beenstrong lecher apliyt [truly], / And strong glutton also” (74.2)—and he pales when he sees stretched out on the instruments oftorture some of his acquaintance (79.4). Before long he himselfhas begun to suffer: drenched in cold, stinking water, scorched byfiery heat, terrified by pits of molten lead, and finally cast into adark, stinking, burning dungeon where pride—evidently Owein’smajor sin—is punished.

At the end of a sequence of trials of increasing intensity, Oweinis brought by a squadron of demons with sixty eyes and sixty handsto a high, narrow bridge above a pitch-black river that “stank foulerthan any hound” (116.4). This is, he is told, the bridge of Paradise,but, if he attempts to cross it, fiends will throw stones at him, astrong wind will blow, and, should he fall, he will be seized by thewaiting “fellows” who will teach him “a new play” (119.4). For theriver below—“So the dominical [Sunday reading] us tell”(123.1)—is the entry of Hell; for anyone who falls off the bridge—“as highas a tower, / And as sharp as a razor” (121.1–2)—there is no re-demption. As they have repeatedly done, the demons offer him achance to turn back. There is no necessity for him to attempt thecrossing: “Fly peril, sorrow, and woe,” they tell him in the accentsof fraudulent solicitude, “And to that stead, there thou comefrom, / Well fair we shall thee lead” (124.4–6). Though fright-ened, Owein remembers that God has repeatedly saved him. Heventures out on the bridge, finds that he feels no razor’s edge, andmanages the perilous passage.

Once he passes through the bejeweled gates of Paradise, he isgreeted by a joyous procession of the saved, in which the churchhierarchy heavily predominates:


Popes with great dignity,And cardinals great plenty,Kings and queens there were,Knights, abbots, and priors,Monks, canons and friar Preachers [Dominicans],And bishops that crosses bear.

Friars Minor [Franciscans] and Jacobins [Dominicans],Friar Carmes [Carmelites] and friar Austins [Augustinians],And nuns white and black. . . .

(38.3)

The knight dwells among them with delight for as long as he ispermitted and then is sent, weeping with reluctance and regret,back to the abbey from which he has come, and to life in the worldof the flesh. Now a holy man, Owein takes up “scrip [pilgrim’s bag]and burden [pilgrim’s staff]” and embarks on a pilgrimage to theHoly Land. On his return—a return, we are told, not to his nativeNorthumberland but to Ireland—he becomes a monk and livesfor another seven years before he dies and goes to Paradise.52 Thepoem ends with a prayer that marks the full transformation of theonce sinful knight:

Now God, for saint Owain’s love,Grant us heaven-bliss aboveBefore his sweet face! Amen.

(198.4–6)

In the visit to Patrick’s Purgatory, the knight experiences for ashort time what he would have to endure, were he condemned toa term of purgatorial torture. And for the reader, too, there is asimilar vicarious experience of fear. For the knight there is also acertain measure of physical pain. “There are (saith he) who saythat the Knight being entered the Hall, was rapt into an ecstasy,”Saint Patrick’s Purgatory notes, “and that in the spirit he saw all thesethings. The Knight confidently affirmed that it was not so, but thathe did see all things with his corporeal eyes, and really felt whathe did suffer.”53 But the torments, along with the demonic threatsof eternal punishment, vanish in the face of pious steadfastness.


The mistake would be to turn back, to compromise, to refuse toface a suffering that is, in comparison to the actual torments ofsouls in Purgatory, only dreamlike, virtual suffering—in Mum-ford’s phrase, “a kind of painted fire.” There is, to be sure, analternative course: a chastened, unimaginative life, less heroic butmore stable and secure in its daily piety. It is this alternative thatthe bishop of Ireland initially urges upon Owein, but the knight,acting as the reader’s surrogate, insists upon a direct encounter,and the reader accordingly follows him into the black hole.

MARKS OF PROTECTION,MARKS OF PAIN

To encounter within carefully demarcated boundaries what mightotherwise spiral out of control; to know states of extreme sufferingand exaltation that are normally inaccessible; to penetrate realmsthat are hidden from view and to return safely, changed forever bywhat one has encountered: Owein’s journey is in some sense amodel of a certain imaginative experience, as it subsequently cameto be developed, an experience to which Dante in the early four-teenth century gave the highest expression. To be sure, neither H.of Sawtry’s Latin Tractatus de Purgatorio Sancti Patricii nor any of theEnglish texts based upon it comes even close to the sublimity ofDante’s Purgatorio. H. of Sawtry’s account gives almost no individu-ating detail to his adventurous knight or to the souls he encoun-ters, and though subsequent narratives invent a past for him torepent—“He particularly repented of the violation of churchesand invasion of ecclesiastical property, besides other enormoussins of which he had been guilty”54—Owein’s character never at-tains the vividness (what classical rhetoric called the enargeia) thatDante’s verse confers on virtually everything it touches.

In an early-fifteenth-century prose text attributed to William ofStranton in the bishopric of Durham, however, one can at leastglimpse traces of the impulse to individualize and thereby intensifythe voyage through the uncouth land. Unlike the earlier accountsat which we have looked, this one is written in the first person.William enters Saint Patrick’s Purgatory on April 14 (Easter Day),


1406.55 He is greeted by demons who present themselves as hisfriends and slyly attempt to dissuade him from continuing on hisvoyage, warning him that he will hurt himself. More disturbingly,he meets his dead sister in the company of the man she had wishedto wed, a wedding William had prevented.56 Blocking a marriagewas a sin—Mirk tells confessors to inquire into acts of this kind57—for which William needs to repent and be shriven. The need torepent is driven home by a terrible sight that Saint John showshim: pits in which sinners are hideously punished, for a limitedduration if they are in Purgatory, forever if they are in Hell. Aroundthese pits, witnessing the tortures, stand those who have been thevictims of the sinners’ actions.

Among a group of priests being tortured, William sees his uncle(eme) who had died sixteen years earlier. The torture consists ofhis being enclosed in plates of burning iron, “and on the plateswere letters and words well written, and through the words werenails of iron all burning smitten into their heads and so into theirhearts and into their bodies.”58 The letters, Saint John explains,were “divine service that they should have said and done every day,with great devotion” (101–3), instead of playing, as they did, infleshly and worldly lusts. Now the words, which would have servedas “marks” of protection, as they do for William during his passagethrough Purgatory, are objects of excruciating pain, pain intensi-fied as the devils rip out the sinners’ hearts and tongues, shredthem, and fling the flaming pieces back into their faces.59 William’sface, by contrast, is safely marked by his prayers. The marks aresigns not simply of pious trust, that is, of an inner condition; theyare also the tokens of proper religious practice. For as William ofStranton’s vision reveals, faith alone is not enough to ensure anescape from pain. The souls in Purgatory possessed sufficient be-lief to save them from an eternity of torment, but they failed torealize and implement this belief in acts that would spare them acleansing suffering after death. William’s work ends with a moni-tory vision of a prioress who has placed an excessive trust in God’smercy. She has been shriven for her sins, but she is condemned tosuffer horribly until doomsday, because trust in God’s mercy is notthe same as a full and proper repentance.


MAKING DREAMS REAL

I remarked above that Saint Patrick’s Purgatory may serve as a modelfor a type of literary experience: an expressive pattern of explora-tion, symbolic suffering, and psychic release that extends fromDante’s Purgatorio to Seamus Heaney’s Station Island. The literarypotential of H. of Sawtry’s vision was directly exploited in Mariede France’s Espurgatoire Seint Patriz and still more in a series ofremarkable works from the Spanish Golden Age, including Perezde Montalban’s Vida y purgatorio de San Patricio (1627), Lope deVega’s El mayor prodigio y Purgatorio en la vida (1627), and Calderonde la Barca’s El purgatorio de San Patricio (1628).60 But if by litera-ture we mean only those works that pull away in some sense fromthe world, that manifest a certain indifference, if not hostility, todirect reference, that call attention to their own verbal inventionand the inventedness of the worlds they depict, then the principalsignificance of the Latin Saint Patrick’s Purgatory, along with itstranslations and adaptations, lies elsewhere. For, far from occu-pying a self-enclosed play space, this text attempts to drive its fanta-sies directly into the earth where it locates the actual cave entrancethat leads into Purgatory. It has nothing to do with the pleasuresof suspended disbelief, a toying with the world and the mind thatenables one to pretend that something is real that one knows isactually an invention or a clever hypothesis. It uses the devices offiction—the central character is a knight from an adventure tale—but it is not content with “as if” or “suppose.” What is really atstake is not character or style or intensity of vision but the daringimaginative act of deploying in narrative a place called Purgatory.The central creative act is to assert that this place actually existsin the world; its consequence is to make people fear their futureimprisonment, attempt to alleviate their anticipated torture there,and even visit it as pilgrims.

The idea that the residual stains of sin would have to be purgedafter death before the cleansed soul could ascend to Heaven is avery ancient one. But, as we have already remarked, the identifica-tion of a specific place for this purgation—a third place, situated


alongside Heaven and Hell—is quite late.61 Dating from the early1180s, H. of Sawtry’s Saint Patrick’s Purgatory is virtually contempo-rary with the theological formulation that it seems to illustrate;indeed, it considerably anticipates the first pontifical definition ofPurgatory, which did not come until a doctrinal discussion be-tween the Latin and Greek churches in 1254. Narrative and doc-trine, then, are intimately intertwined.62

This doctrinal issue—the dogmatic insistence on the existenceof time and progress in a specially demarcated zone of the other-world—is obviously conceptually crucial, but it does not by itselfcall forth a narrative such as Saint Patrick’s Purgatory or exhaust itssignificance. Why should the story of the knight’s passage throughthe afterlife have seemed important enough to the Cistercians tocirculate in so many manuscripts? Why were its tales translated,recycled as exempla and deployed in sermons? Why did monks,theologians, and preachers, with their sophisticated intellectual re-sources, think they needed Owein the knight? The answer lies inthe fact, possibly as apparent then as now, that Purgatory is aninnovative work of the imagination. Apparent, but inadmissible.Does it bear repeating that it is all made up, every bit of it? Thatno one comes back with reports from the dead; that the dreamsdreamt by coma victims have no more claim on reality than anyother dreams, that the whole elaborate organizing structure of reli-gious belief and practice in the Middle Ages was a sublime fiction?Purgatory is only an extreme and vulnerable instance of somethingfar more widespread: it is palpably invented and obviously new andstartlingly phantasmatic, and yet it must somehow pretend to havethe compelling vividness and solidity of those things that we actu-ally know to exist. The monks who launched the story were notpropounding a doctrine; they were shaping and colonizing theimagination, specifically the imagination of what, if anything, fol-lows the death of the body. Of course, their religion had had longexperience in doing this: Heaven and Hell are overwhelmingly im-pressive predecessors and models, next to which the middle spaceof souls is a relatively minor, belated innovation. But the very belat-edness enables us to view close-up what the antiquity of Heaven


and Hell largely obscures: the process by which philosophical ab-stractions, institutional ambitions, and inchoate fears acquire alocal habitation and a name.

This process turns out to rely heavily on literature: the made-upstory of Owein—not simply an abstract principle of successiveevents in time but the adventures of a named hero—helped tomake real a place that would have initially seemed to be made up.Why should it have done so? That is, why was the theological claimnot by itself sufficient? Or what was there—for that matter, what isthere—about literature that made it so serviceable? In part theanswer is that narrative is the principal home of eyewitnessing. H.of Sawtry’s text is crude, compared to the sophisticated, intellectu-ally supple, and challenging writings of the theologians, but itcould claim to record a direct, personal encounter. Of course, suchclaims do not come with ontological guarantees, at least not guar-antees that one could stake one’s life on. But as we have alreadyseen, Saint Patrick’s Purgatory counters skepticism by playing simpleyet extremely effective games with reference—setting, for exam-ple, Patrick’s dream of the mystical staff and book against his wak-ing discovery of these divine tokens in solid reality. To be sure, thatclaimed discovery is no more tangibly real in any logical sense thanthe dream, but H. of Sawtry can appeal both in general to thereader’s comfortable knowledge of real-life staffs and books andin particular to the purported survival of these same material ob-jects as relics that may still be viewed: “God’s Staff, I understand,”the Middle English Owayne Miles puts it, “Men clepeth [calleth] thatstaff in Ireland / Yet to this ich [very] day” (10.40–46). Perhaps thenarrator’s uncharacteristic phrase “I understand” expresses somereservation about the relic, some lack of absolute confidence thatthe object men call “God’s Staff” is the very staff that Saint Patrickawoke to find in his possession. But the existence of the relic isnonetheless reassuring, for it provides the ordinary material per-ception upon which the larger claim for the existence of what can-not be seen is built. Two other early English versions of the OwayneMiles, in the Cotton and Yale manuscripts, strengthen this link byobserving that the staff remains the object of a ritualized display.


Saint Patrick received the “rich staff” and the book, we are told,with good cheer:

And yet be those rich relics there,And at every feast-day in the yearThey been borne in processionWith full great devotion.The archbishop of that landShall bear that staff in his hand.Whoso will wyte [know] what it hatte [is called],“Jesu staff” men call it yet.63

To some readers, the sight of the staff—or the confident assurancethat the staff could in fact be seen—must have reinforced the ac-count elsewhere in the work of a realm that is beyond mortal vi-sion: such, at least, must have been the conviction of those whopublicly burned the staff in Dublin in 1538.64

But even without the material existence of the relic, the play ofdream and waking in the Owayne Miles is one of the basic meansby which, in Elaine Scarry’s phrase, “the verbal arts enlist our imag-inations in mental actions that in their vivacity more closely resem-ble sensing than daydreaming.” Analyzing a scene in Proust inwhich an image from a magic lantern is projected on the walls anddoor of the narrator’s room, Scarry notes that though the fictivewall is just as insubstantial as the fictive magic lantern’s image, theimage nonetheless has the odd effect of making the wall seemsolid: “[B]y the peculiar gravitational rules of the imagination,two or more images that are each independently weightless cannevertheless confer weight on one another.”65 This is the effect thatthe Owayne Miles attempts to achieve (and evidently, for its medi-eval audience, succeeded spectacularly in achieving) by setting theairy thinness of fictive dreaming over against the thickness of fic-tive reality.

To this device we may add many others, equally simple andequally effective, beginning with the basic notations of time andspace (“near,” “soon,” “further,” and so forth) by which direct wit-nessing has been narrated at least since Herodotus:


When he came nigh the stead [place]He looked up soon anon;Strong [difficult] it was further to go,He heard screech and grede [shout].

(64.3–6)

Narrative is the principal textual means of doing what paintingdoes: creating and populating a space.66 Like the landscapes inmedieval painting, the underground realm in the Owayne Miles isnot organized on the principles of perspective. The hero movesthrough a sequence of discontinuous spaces, characterized by onlythe most conventional of topographical features and not rationallylinked to one another. Yet what emerges is a distinct and recogniz-able landscape, the landscape of fear.

Looking at the tiny marks on the page, we cannot see or hearanything other than those marks themselves: the undergroundrealm is obviously inaccessible to our senses. We cannot feel theicy wind or smell the stench from the black river or hear thescreams of the tortured, but, we are told, Owein does. He goeswhere we cannot, passing from one of the hidden spaces to an-other, and reports to us what he has experienced for himself andwhat we would experience had we the courage or misfortune toenter the cave. In the course of doing so, he even expresses thewonder that readers must feel at the claim that there are greatfields and enormous stone halls below the ground. First the claimis made: “The hall was full selly dight [marvelously made], / Suchcan make no earthly wight / The pillars stood wide.” And thenOwein responds on our behalf: “The knight wondered,” we aretold, “that he found / Such a hall in that land, / And open in eachside” (44.1–6). The descriptions of what he sees constitute a kindof narrative map or guide, a set of instructions for fashioning animage of the otherworld.

Beginning in the late twelfth century, the church, which had leftdetails of the place of purgation vague, and which had refused orneglected even to specify whether it was a “place” at all, decidedto tell people what they could expect to see and experience. But


they needed a volunteer: Owein is this volunteer, the one who hasgone and returns to bear witness.

The Owayne Miles stresses the voluntary, even willful, nature ofthe hero’s decision: “Nay, Owein, friend!” the bishop says, whenthe knight first proposes to enter Purgatory; “That ich [same] wayshalt thou not wend” (36.1–2). But his determination to proceedis fixed—“For nought the bishop could say, / The knight wouldnot leten [abandon] his way” (37.1–2)—and remains so when thefiends attempt to dissuade him in very similar terms. This sense ofovercoming a difficult obstacle helps to rationalize our exclusionfrom the vision, but once the initial free choice is established, itgives way to its opposite, a sense of directedness and boundedness.Owein does not move freely within Purgatory; he is led. Indeed,his initial experience, after he has rejected the fiends’ urging toturn back, is of extreme duress. The fiends build a great fire andthen turn on their unwelcome guest: “Feet and hand they boundhim hard, / And cast him amidward” (60.1–2). Here, as later, heis saved when he calls on God, but the divine protection does notpreclude further unsuccessful demonic attempts to seize him, nordoes it ever altogether free him from constraint. When the fiendsare not trying to hook him onto the burning wheel or cast himinto the filthy river or plunge him into the pit of molten metal orthrow him off the narrow bridge, they are leading him “with greatpain” from place to place (90.1).

We might imagine that constraint is specifically what it means tobe in the hands of demons, but this is not exactly the case. As soonas Owein makes it clear to the bishop that he is adamant in hisintention to proceed, he immediately loses all sense of free agencyand is led off, just as he is later led off by the demons:

For naught the bishop could say,The knight would not at all abandon his way,His soul to amend.Then led he him into holy church,God’s works for to wirche [perform],And the right law him kende [taught].

(37)


For fifteen days he is kept “in affliction / In fasting and in orison,”at the end of which time he is brought in a solemn procession tothe entrance of the hole.

Why, if it is not a clear marker of the difference between priestsand demons, should the Owayne Miles emphasize the hero’s con-straint? The answer seems linked to the other features we havenoted that work to establish the solid reality of what might other-wise too patently appear an imaginary realm.67 The hero is notmoving about in a world of his own making but acting accordingto detailed instructions. Here is the gate, the prior tells the knight,

And when thou a while ygone hast,Light of day thou all forlast [will lose],Ac [but] hold thee even north.

(39.4–6)

Having set his direction, the prior goes on to tell Owein what heshould expect: he will come to a field in which he will find a stonehall lit with a faint wintry light. He is to wait there until thirteenmen who will give him further instructions join him. It all happensas foretold, and Owein continues to follow their instructionsthrough the rest of his voyage, even as he is being dragged aboutby the demons.

Obviously, the knight is the nominal object of all of the direc-tives, but equally obviously it is the reader who is their principalrecipient. For this is how the great process of invention begins:after centuries in which the faithful were permitted to daydream,as it were, about what their purgation after death might be like,they are now receiving detailed instructions about precisely whatthey can expect to encounter. Their imagination of the afterlife isno longer indeterminate or free: it is guided, shaped, and con-strained in the ways that successful narratives always guide, shape,and constrain the imagination of those who come under their sway.

I have stressed the extent to which the whole project of the medi-eval narrative was to induce readers to credit the reality of Purga-tory, to confer upon it the “givenness” of those things that actuallyexist. But there is nothing reassuringly familiar about the land-scape we are instructed to imagine and very little that is convinc-


ing, in the mode of narrative realism, about the knight’s experi-ences. On the contrary, the torture fields littered with gridironsand whirling wheels, the hundreds of thousands of broken bodies,the huge red mountain, the stinking river that runs under themountain like a bolt from a crossbow, the blast of wind powerfulenough to lift the knight into the air, the castle filled with pits ofburning metal, the bridge that is “many miles” above the black,burning water: this is the topography of nightmare, not of solidreality. We could simply attribute this to limited narrative gifts: H.of Sawtry is not Tolstoy or Proust. But the Owayne Miles has in factprecisely the representational means that it needs to produce itsparticular desired effect: the perception of a realm in which timeand space are warped, the laws of physics are suspended, and theboundaries between the living and the dead are blurred.

The Owayne Miles wants to affirm that Purgatory is real, but thereality it depicts is dreamlike: solid things suddenly dissolve, doorsopen in blank walls, snow and fire together fall from the sky, wordshave magical effects over objects, creatures are composed out ofthe parts of different animals, the body is burned or torn to piecesonly to be revived in order to submit to further experiments inexcruciating pain, and all at once pain gives way to exquisite joy.These elements, so close to our experience of fantasy, distance theOwayne Miles from any claim on ordinary reality, but here they workto convey almost effortlessly the nature of the extraordinary realitythat is being doctrinally affirmed.

In the seventeenth century there was an attempt to give thisdreamlike reality convincing pictorial representation by means ofa device that oddly anticipates Proust’s shimmering image. In hisRomani Collegi Societatus Jesu Musaeum celeberrimum . . . (Amsterdam,1678), the indefatigable Jesuit intellectual Athanasius Kircherclaims to have invented the magic lantern. The image of this can-dlelit slide projector, whose lifelike images left its viewers, heclaims, ravished in admiration, shows a band of eight transparen-cies, including a chicken, a figure of Time with a scythe, a personon his or her knees praying, and so forth. But the transparencythat is actually being projected onto the wall is of a soul in Purga-tory, burning in fire and imploring help (fig. 10).68


Fig. 10. Magic Lantern. Athanasius Kircher, Romani Collegii Societatus JesuMusaeum celeberrimum (1678), p. 125. By permission of the Houghton Library,

Harvard University.

The church, even at its most aggressive, did not require that thefaithful accept this or that topographical feature of Purgatory asliterally true: one was not positively obliged to believe in the exis-tence of the whirling wheel on which “an hundred thousand soulsand more” were hanging on hooks, or the hideous, flaming drag-ons, or the vicious seven-colored fire surging forth from theground, or even the black toads, newts, adders, and snakes. Buteach of these frightening elements helped to fill the space uponwhose literal existence the church did insist. And their dreamlikequalities doubled back in a satisfying way to confirm the wholemovement that the work sketches from skepticism to belief: thepagans regard Purgatory as a dream and declare that they will notbelieve it until they see it for themselves; Saint Patrick dreams adream; the dream becomes the reality of the black hole; the hole


is said to be the entrance to Purgatory; and Purgatory turns out tohave the structure and imagery of a dream. This sounds suspi-ciously circular, but only because we have left out of our summarya crucial and quite literal structure: the fair abbey, “with power andeke with rich” (21.6), that is constructed around the hole.

THE HOLE IN THE GROUND

The hole or cave enclosed by the abbey’s walls at Lough Derg innorthern Ulster became one of the important pilgrimage sites ofthe Middle Ages, attracting penitents many of whom were drawnby the belief—tenacious in spite of official attempts to modify it—that a person who entered this place would have no other Purga-tory.69 There were considerable hardships and risks associated withthe pilgrimage, which was represented as an ordeal. The difficultyof the journey itself, the period of fasting and discipline that pre-ceded entry into the cave, and the dangers posed by whatever laywithin all combined to make the pilgrimage more like a ritualizedmartial exploit than a religious journey. Significantly, all of the me-dieval pilgrims to Lough Derg whose identities are known weremale.

The extent to which the dangers were physical was open to ques-tion. One authority, Gabriel Pennotus, claims that “they who beingtruly penitent shall enter into this Purgatory, and do suffer thosecruel pains, whether by a real passion, or if only but by an imagi-nary apprehension [sive per veram passionem, sive per imaginariamapprehensionem], shall be purged from all punishments due to themfor their sins.”70 Though the Protestant Holinshed speaks of “theold withered worm-eaten legend, loaded with as many loud liesand lewd lines,” he nonetheless rehearses Gerald of Wales’s oldreport that “if any be so hardy as to take one night his lodging inany of these inns [the nine caves on the island], which hath beenexperimented by some rash and hare-brained adventurers, straitthese spirits claw him by the back and tug him ruggedly and tosshim crabbedly.”71 Still more were the risks psychological: the horri-ble spectacle of torment, the cries of the sufferers, the hideousgrinning of the demons, and the intense fear could undermine a


person’s sanity. It was said, as Caxton notes, that when a pilgrimreturned from the experience of Purgatory, “never shall nothingin this world please him that he shall see nor he shall never bejoyous nor glad nor shall not be seen to laugh but shall be continu-ally in wailings and weepings for the sins that he hath commit-ted.”72 Hence, for example, a German pilgrim who visited LoughDerg around 1400 is said to have refused, on his return, to eatanything but bread and salt:

Nor could he show a cheerful face, but looked all the time asthough they would immediately kill him and when they askedhim why he was always so sad, he said: If any man among youhad seen the tenth part of that I have seen, he could never behappy again all the days of his life. The same monk by thefavour of his Abbot became a Hermit in a forest, where helived a severe hard life, ever thinking of the great misery whichhe had seen in the aforesaid Purgatory and he lived nearlytwelve years longer.73

Comparable stories testify not simply to the risks of the pilgrimageto Lough Derg but to the serious, long-term effects, in this lifeand beyond, that pilgrims were reputed to experience from theirdescent into the cave.

The Catholic Church, however, was never altogether comfort-able with the claims made on behalf of Lough Derg, claims that attimes seemed as much to threaten as to substantiate the doctrine.74

In part the threat lay in an exaggerated faith in the efficacy of thepilgrimage, a faith that seemed to call into question the wholemoral logic not only of purgatorial suffering but of penitence andabsolution. Popular belief went so far as to imagine that a descentinto the hole would settle in advance—and always favorably—thejudgment of the soul.75 In part the threat lay in the opposite direc-tion, in the skepticism provoked by recurring reports that the won-ders of Lough Derg were grossly exaggerated, and by complaintsthat the pilgrimage site was nothing more than a crassly commer-cial exploitation of vulgar superstitions. “I have spoken with diversemen that have been therein,” writes Caxton in 1480, among whomwas a “high Canon of Waterford, which told me that he had been


therein five or six times. And he saw nor suffered no suchthings. . . . [save that] in their sleep some men have marvelousdreams. And other thing saw he not. And in likewise told to me aworshipful knight of Bruges named Sir John de Banste that he hadbeen therein in like wise and seen none other thing but as aforeis said.”76

Henry Jones, who in the mid–seventeenth century was the Prot-estant bishop of Clogher, the diocese in which Lough Derg is situ-ated, assembles considerable evidence of such skepticism and disil-lusionment. As early as 1240, according to Jones, VincentiusBelluacensis remarks that Saint Patrick’s Purgatory was “a merefable,” and in 1265 Saint Bonaventure concurs: “[I]t was fabu-lously reported that Purgatory was in that place” (ex hoc fabuloseornant est, quod ibi esset purgatorium). Their comments suggest thatthe work of transforming the story (fabula) into reality was nevercomplete, that the mystical dream attributed to Saint Patrick re-mained for at least some observers only a dream, that the attemptto provide eyewitness evidence of the existence of Purgatory wasundermined by eyewitness accounts of its supposed entrance. Thechorus of complaints gathered by Jones rises in the late fifteenthcentury: Ponticus Virumnius of Blasius Biragus notes that the siteis “nothing agreeable to the Fables commonly related of it”; Joachi-mus Vadianus reports that the Irish “fable that they that go thither,go into the place of Souls: and that being returned they can nomore laugh, which is extremely vain”; and Abertus (sic) Krantziusis entirely dismissive: “The Irish remember a Purgatory of a some-time Saint, called Patrick. . . . These dreams and flitting Monsters[Somnia & monstra], I thought not good to insert in a discourse ofthings done, being more like unto old wives Tales.”77

On Saint Patrick’s Day, 1497, the pilgrimage site at Lough Dergwas destroyed on orders of the pope, Alexander VI. The space ofPurgatory had returned to the precincts of the mind. The demo-tion was only temporary: the office of Saint Patrick was introducedin the Roman missals in 1522, and pilgrimage resumed, at aslightly different location in Lough Derg, in the sixteenth century.But the uneasiness continued.78 “Touching the credit of those mat-ters,” writes the Jesuit Edmund Campion in 1570, obviously trying


to be very careful, “I see no cause but a Christian man, assuringhimself that there is both Heaven and Hell, may without vanityupon sufficient information be persuaded that it might please Godat some time for considerations to his infinite wisdom known toreveal by miracles the vision of joys and pains eternal.” Thus farCampion seems to be heading toward an acceptance of Saint Pat-rick’s Purgatory, basing its “credit” both on the possibility of mira-cles and on the half-expressed notion that if Heaven and Hell exist,as all Christians believe, then a middle state may also exist. But thewonders reported by pilgrims who visited Lough Derg were notrepresented as miraculous or exceptional; they were, it wasclaimed, what all visitors who ventured into the cave could see forthemselves. And hence Campion begins to pull back sharply fromthe legends associated with the pilgrimage site. Miracles might in-deed occur, but, he continues,

that altogether in such sort and so ordinarily and to such per-sons and by such means as the common fame and some rec-ords thereof do utter, I neither believe nor wish to be re-garded. . . . a man of indifferent judgment may soon suspectthat in the drift and strength of imagination a contemplativeperson would happily suppose the sight of many strangethings which he never saw. Since writing hereof I met with apriest, who told me that he had gone the same pilgrimage andaffirmed the order of premises: but that he for his own partsaw no sight in the world, save only fearful dreams when hechanced to nod and those he said were exceedingly horrible:further he added that the taste is rated more or less accordingto the quality of the penitent and that the place seemed tohim scarcely able to contain six persons.79

Another English Jesuit, Richard Stanihurst, in a Latin accountprinted in Antwerp in 1587, acknowledges that the stories of vi-sions are not current: “In fact those, who have locked themselvesup in this place in our memory, have not felt any terror overcastthem save perchance a closer sleep embraced them. But in thefirst seedtime of religion (the period when miracles are far more


frequent) I believe it is true that many horrible and terrible shapesto the sight were wont to appear before the eyes of penitents.”80

If many Catholics were guarded and uncomfortable aboutthe old legends of Saint Patrick’s Purgatory, Protestants were noteven remotely concerned to salvage its credit. In Veron’s dialogueThe Hunting of Purgatory to Death, a credulous character namedDydimus expresses some interest in making the pilgrimage. “Didye never hear of the Purgatory of Saint Patrick,” he asks his Protes-tant friends; “Do ye not remember what books we had of it, whenwe were little children and went to school?” The dialogue, writtenin 1561, is looking back at the Catholic instruction that its authorand most of his readers would have had. “Ye make me now toremember mine old grandame’s tales,” replies the skeptical Eutra-pelus, who asks whether Dydimus is mocking or dreaming. Dydi-mus assures his friend that he is in earnest: “It is not a place, to bemocked with all, since that all they, that have been there neverlaugh after, but lose all their joy.” The mention of this legend givesEutrapelus the opportunity to modulate mockery into sourcestudy:

Then it is like unto the pit and cave of Trophonius, which isin Lebadia, of the which hole or pit, the ancient authors havewritten in a manner the same, that our dreamers have writtenof the Purgatory of saint Patrick. Therefore, I doubt not, butthat one fable did engender an other.81

If the distinctive features of Saint Patrick’s Purgatory can be foundin classical sources, then the pilgrimage will be disclosed to be apagan fantasy, the most recent and preposterous of a chain ofdreams that have been engendering one another.

Learned Catholics, of course, knew as much about Trophonius’scave—the subterranean chamber in Boeotia whence suppliantswho had gone to consult the oracle of Zeus Trophonius alwaysemerged pale and dejected—as did learned Protestants. Facedwith the obvious parallels between pagan mythology and Purga-tory, Catholic apologists perfectly reasonably observed that classi-cal sources contain a great deal of the teachings in which all Chris-


tians must believe, not simply the landscape of Hell and Purgatory.There is a risk in such observations, of course, the risk of confront-ing the mythic foundations of doctrines that claim to be the literaltruth. But believers, whether Catholic or Protestant, could alwaysargue, as the French Jesuit Noel Taillepied does, that anything doc-trinally true in the pagan texts derived from the Jews or the Chris-tians. “It were a witless thing,” Taillepied wrote in A Treatise of Ghosts(1588), “utterly to disregard the view of these Latin and Greekwriters. We, who know the truth and have the light of Christianity,ought rather to consider that the truths contained in their teach-ing concerning the future life are either drawn from us or fromthat sacred Hebrew tradition, which is fulfilled and incorporatedin the Catholic doctrine.”82

It would, this argument implies, be equally risky for Protestantsto push too hard on the skeptical implications of a causal link be-tween paganism and certain Christian doctrines: the skepticismmay quickly begin to erode more than the targeted Catholicpractices. Hence perhaps the slight queasiness that Veron’s spokes-man Eutrapelus immediately manifests with his own account ofthe classical sources of the pilgrimage site’s main features. “OurMaster doctor” who taught us about Saint Patrick’s Purgatorywhen we were young, he grumbles, must have been “at school withsome old rotten witch from whom he did bring this divinity untous.”83 Another participant in the dialogue objects to railing atsuch a virtuous and learned man, but Eutrapelus challenges thatlearning:

If he had been brought up in humanity, I would think that hehad read this, that he did preach unto us, in the poetry ofHomer or Virgil, and of other Greek and Latin Poets, or inPlutarch. For, I am sure that any man can find all ye samematter, being in a manner intreated of after the same sort ashe hath set it forth unto us, in those ancient authors, andspecially in the works of Plutarch, who doth rehearse the mar-velous wonders that one Timarchus had seen in the den orcave of Trophonius, which do not differ much from those thatwe have heard of our master doctor. . . . But to tell, as I think,


I believe, that he hath rather learned this goodly divinity inthe shepherd’s calendar, and in Dante, than in any of thoseLatin and Greek writers.84

Veron does not want to give up the core perception—that SaintPatrick’s Purgatory is a tangle of fictions—but he would rather as-sociate the Catholic priests with medieval sources (including a rareallusion to Dante) than with more prestigious classical learning.

For later Elizabethan and Jacobean writers, the pilgrimage sitein Ulster had become part of a repertory of Irish jokes: “Why then,should all your Chimny-sweepers likewise be Irishmen,” asks oneof the characters in Part 2 of Dekker’s The Honest Whore, to whichthe answer is that “S. Patrick you know keeps Purgatory, he makesthe fire, and his Countrymen could do nothing, if they cannotsweep the Chimneys.”85 In a poem by Ralph Knevet, “Security,” theplace serves as a figure of illusion for vain, earthbound Man, whohopes to ignore all that lies ahead:

Yet He lives, as if Hell,Were but a fable, or a story,A place of fancy, that might parallelThe old St Patrick’s Purgatory.He mirth recruits with cups, and seldom thinksOf Death, until into the grave He sinks.86

Saint Patrick’s Purgatory may have become a standing joke forProtestants, but, as Knevet’s poem suggests, its patent fictionalitythreatened to infect the whole Christian vision of the afterlife withan air of fable. Moreover, despite the uneasiness of certain Catho-lics, it continued to attract large numbers of pilgrims, seducingthem into what Protestants regarded as grotesque superstition. In1632, the state authorities moved to bring not simply the practicesbut the place itself to an end. Agents of the earl of Cork and thelord chancellor rowed to the island and found “four hundred sev-enty one persons doing such fooleries as is not to be imaginedcould be done among Christians.”87 Noting that all attempts at re-form had failed, the Privy Council determined that a move simplyto block access to the island would not work, for “the seduced


people will secretly find opportunity to resort thither, and so bystealths continue these superstitious abuses, while the place stan-deth.”88 Accordingly, on October 25, 1632, James Spottiswoode,bishop of Clogher, came to Lough Derg with a company of twentywell-armed men supplied with demolition tools. It was, he notedin a letter written some days later to the archbishop of Armagh, agood thing that he was so accompanied, since neither the highsheriff of Donegal nor the high sheriff of Farmanagh provided theassistance they had promised. The occasion was inauspicious—“Iwas forced [to wait], on a rainy day, on a bleak place without anyshelter to horse, or man, three hours before we could have theBoat”—but Spottiswoode carried on with his mission.

His account is worth quoting at some length for its sober enact-ment of a secular ritual of disenchantment, the transformation ofa sacred space back into a mute heap of stones and dirt:

The first thing I searched diligently after, was the Cave,wherein I remembered your Grace enjoined me to dig to thevery foundations, and leave no corner unsought, and so I did:I caused to dig about it on all sides, till I came to the Rockbut found no appearance of any secret passage, either to theChapel or to the Lough: neither would the nature of theground suffer it, in a word this Cave was a poor beggarly hole,made with some stones, laid together with men’s hands with-out any great Art: and after covered with Earth, such as hus-bandmen make to keep a few Hogs from the rain.

When I could find nothing there, I undermined theChapel, which was well covered with shingles, and brought alldown together. Then we brake down the Circles and SaintsBeds, which were like so many Coalpits, and so pulled downsome great Irish houses. Thus when I had defaced all savingone Irish house: I came out of the Island myself, and left onehalf of my men behind to pull that down also so soon as theyshould see me landed, not sooner; lest if by a storm we weredriven back, we might want a place to shelter us.

The country people expected that S. Patrick would havewrought some miracle, but thanks be to God none of my Com-


pany received any other harm but the bad ways, broken caw-sies, and the dangerous going in a little Boat: Yet our comfortis, we effected that for which we came thither, which was morethan was expected could be done in so short a time, whichhath wonderfully displeased them that were bewitched withthese fooleries. But that I doe not much stand upon, in regardI have obeyed the Command of the State.89

) 3 (

THE RIGHTS OF MEMORY

ANYONEwho has experienced the death of a close friend or relativeknows the feeling: not only the pain of sudden, irrevocable loss butalso the strange, irrational expectation of recovery. The telephonerings, and you are suddenly certain that your dead friend is on theother end of the line; the elevator door opens, and you expectyour dead father to step out into the hallway, brushing the snowfrom the shoulders of his coat. These are not merely modern feel-ings; in fact it is startling that we continue to have them so vividly,since everything in the contemporary world works to suppressthem. They were not suppressed in the past.The brilliance of the doctrine of Purgatory—whatever its topo-

graphical implausibility, its scriptural belatedness, and its prone-ness to cynical abuse—lay both in its institutional control over in-eradicable folk beliefs and in its engagement with intimate, privatefeelings. Reports of hauntings were going to recur from time totime, nomatter what churchmen soberly declared. (They continueto recur, for that matter, no matter what intellectuals declare.) Pur-gatory enabled the church to make sense of these reports, to har-ness the weird and potentially disruptive psychic energy to itsliturgical system, and to distinguish carefully between those experi-ences that could be absorbed into the moral order (encounterswith “good” ghosts) and those that had to be consigned to thesphere of the demonic.1 The notion of suffrages—masses, almsgiv-ing, fasts, and prayers—gave mourners something constructive todo with their feelings of grief and confirmed those feelings of reci-

103T H E RI G H T S O F M E M O RY

procity that survived, at least for a limited time, the shock of death.Moreover, the church could find in Purgatory a way to enablemourners to work through, with less psychological distress thanthey otherwise might experience, their feelings of abandonmentand anger at the dead. To imagine the dead in great pain no doubtcaused alarm, fear, and pity, but it also served other, murkier needs,needs that could be resolved in organized acts of mercy or even inthe delay or withholding of organized acts of mercy.But there were urgent questions that needed to be resolved be-

fore any such acts could be initiated. Virtually everyone recognizedthe need to distinguish in some way or other between dreams, hal-lucinations, and fantasies, on the one hand, and real encounterswith the dead, on the other. And then once it was established—bywhatever means people ordinarily use to reassure themselves thatthey are in touch with something outside their own mind andheart—that the encounter was real, the question remained how todetermine the nature of the being that had returned from thedead. The principal answer lay in the practice of a discretio spi-rituum—ameans to distinguish between good and evil spirits—thatwas particularly important from the late fourteenth through theseventeenth century.2 A ghost is forced to submit to a rigorouscross-examination centered on six key questions: Quis? Quid?Quare? Cui? Qualiter? Unde? In another, simplified version of thisjudicial ritual, there are three questions—Nomen? Causas? Reme-dium?—followed by a formula:

We immediately beg you through Jesus Christ, you spirit, tosay who you are, and if there is one among us to whom youwish to respond, to name him or point him out with a sign:“Is it this one, N.?” “Or perhaps that one, N.?” And so forth,while naming everyone else present, for it is understood thathe will not respond to each one of them. If a voice or a noiseis heard when someone is named, it is that person who is toquestion him, by asking him of which man he is the soul, whyhe has come, what he wants, if he wishes suffrages, either inmasses or in alms. And how many masses? Six, ten, twenty,thirty, one hundred? Said by which priests? Regulars or secu-

104 C H A P T ER T H RE E

lars? Or in fasting; what kind? How much? By whom? As foralmsgiving, to the profit of whom should they be given? Inhospices or in leprosaria? Or to beggars and poor? And whatsign will he give of his liberation?3

The use of experts versed in the discretio spirituum, along with thestylized narrative recounting of apparitions in exempla (illustrativestories intended for sermons), mirabilia (collections of marvels),miracula (collections of miracles), and the like, brought someorder andmeaning to the violent, spectral eruptions. Each person,Jean-Claude Schmitt writes,

could situate himself in the continuous chain of relatives, wit-nesses, informants, preachers, and authors who assured thetransmission of tales, and to these tales each person could addthat of his own dreams. Thus the living made the voice ofthe dead their own, a voice which, strong with the authorityconferred upon it by its supernatural origin, reminded themof all the norms of Christian society.4

Fortified with their questions, Nomen? Causas? Remedium?, theliving come to know with whom they are dealing and what remainsto be done. In this way, as Schmitt remarks, apparitions of thedead were “banalized.” This banalization was not an isolated phe-nomenon:

It responded to a general strategy, whose goal was to create aChristian mode of edifying familiarity with death and thedead, orchestrated moreover by the increased ritualization offuneral services, by the valuing of the space of the cemeteryas a holy space in the heart of the community of the living,through participation in the burial services of the dead and,within the privileged classes, through the daily reading of thebook of hours.5

The doctrine of Purgatory, as we have seen, occupied a placeat the center of Christendom’s ritualized strategies of familiarity,containment, and control. These strategies extended to the pre-cise calculation of the number of masses or quantity of alms that


might be required in relation to the probable number of years ofpurgatorial suffering, an “accounting of the hereafter” thatJacques Chiffoleau has related to the rise in the later Middle Agesof double-entry bookkeeping.6 By these means, the living nolonger need to feel paralyzed with anxiety and uncertainty in theface of spectral visitations.The problem is that, discretio spirituum and double-entry book-

keeping notwithstanding, those visitations always had about themsomething disorderly, threatening, and wild. The emphasis in thesurviving records upon clerical formulas and bureaucratic proce-dures inevitably falsifies the profound emotional disturbance thatthe doctrine of Purgatory and its attendant rituals attempted torelieve. It is difficult at this distance to take the human measure ofthis disturbance—medieval narrative conventions, as well as doc-trinal considerations, allowed very little scope for the articulationof particularized, individualized existential dread—but there areat least a few documents from the period that enable us to registerits intensity.

THE VOICE IN THE BEDROOM

One of the most remarkable and compelling of such documentsdescribes a haunting that took place in 1323 (or 1324) in the townof Ales, near Avignon, in southern France. The core of this accountis a succinct report written in the first person by a celebrated Do-minican prior, Jean Gobi, and presented to Pope John XXII. Cop-ies of this report, which is in effect the transcript of a scholasticdisputatio between the cleric and the specter, began to circulatealmost immediately, as did brief sketches in letters sent by variousfigures in (or in close contact with) the papal court in Avignon. Itwas by this means that the story probably first reached England:the pope’s chaplain, Jean de Rosse, canon of Hereford (and laterbishop of Carlisle), sent a version to Walter Reynolds, bishop ofWorcester (and, after 1327, archbishop of Canterbury).7 By thelatter half of the fourteenth century, a longer description of theencounter, now no longer a deposition but rather a third-personnarrative of a full-fledged conversation between the prior and the


ghost, had been written, probably by someone in Bologna, and wasalso soon in wide circulation.8

Judging from its many copies, paraphrases, and vernacular trans-lations (including French, High and Low German, Catalan, Gallic,and Swedish), this narrative aroused considerable interest, ap-pearing in Middle English in the fourteenth century in both proseand rhyme versions. The Gast of Gy (as these English versions of thenarrative are titled) recounts that in the period immediately afterthe death on December 16 of a prosperous, well-regarded bour-geois named Gui de Corvo, his widow is terrified, day and night,by the sound of something moving in her bedroom.9 Though shecannot see any figure, she understands that the source of thenoises is supernatural, but she does not know whether they derivefrom the ghost of her husband or from some fiend’s deceitfulness(“faynding [feigning]” in the verse version; “gylerie [guile]” in theprose). At her wits’ end, the haggard woman goes to the prior ofthe Dominicans in Ales and asks for help. She can no longer con-ceal what she has seen and heard, she explains, adding a significantdetail: the spirit is haunting her bed, the same bed in which herhusband died.10

In the prose translation of The Gast of Gy, the widow characterizesthe visitation as a “wonder.” The term, echoed by the prior whospeaks to his fellow Dominicans of the “wonderful case” and even-tually goes in person to witness “that wonderful thing,” seems care-fully chosen to convey uncertainty about the nature or origin ofthe spirit.11 The uncertainty plays off the work’s initial claim thatit is going to relate a “miracle,” a term it defines with some preci-sion, following Augustine, as a high or “uncustomable” thing thatexceeds man’s ordinary faculties for the purpose of strengthen-ing faith. Jesus Christ, the opening passage continues, ordainedsuch an indescribable miracle in Ales, so that “we might havegreater certainty of the life that is to come.”12 But those to whomthe ghost first appeared are anything but certain about the natureand purpose of their encounter, and they do not dare to character-ize it as a miracle. The term they use instead is a way at once ofacknowledging and suspending judgment upon the preternatural


quality of the event, its apparent violation of the laws of nature,its uncanniness.A wonder is not necessarily a miracle—it does not explicitly or

definitively have God’s hand in it—and its strangeness may derivefrom a variety of sources, sacred and profane. The emotion of won-der is an experience that precedes a secure determination of goodor evil; the person who wonders does not know whether to ap-proach or to flee, to follow or to fight. The play of conflictingimpulses is carried over even into what the prior intends as entirelyreassuring words to the anxious widow: “Be not awondered of thiscase,” he says, because “Our Lord is wonderful in his works.”13 It isnot clear why recognizing that God’s works are wonderful shouldmake the widow cease to wonder. In fact, as the narrative makesclear, the prior himself is deeply “awondered” and deeply anxious.(The narrative will repeatedly make clear the limitation of the pri-or’s understanding.) He hurries off to ring the chapter bell inorder to consult his brethren—for, in this as in other cases, heexplains, the counsel of many wise men is better than the counselof one man alone. Following the advice of the other friars, hechooses the wisest among them—a master of theology and a mas-ter of philosophy. In the event, these scholars play no further partas advisers, either in theological or philosophical matters; it suf-fices that he is accompanied by scholars of any kind (indeed, in theverse text, instead of a philosopher there is a master of geometry).Together they go off to consult the mayor, who assigns two hun-dred men, armed “from top to toe,” to accompany the prior to thescene of the haunting and to follow his orders.14

The cast of characters then widens out from the widow to theprior to intellectuals within the church to the civic authority thatprovides whatever protection weapons can afford in such cases. Acircular path, which is also an institutional itinerary, leads fromthe bedroom to the monastery to the chapter house within themonastery to the city and then back to the bedroom. The ghost’sappearance originates as a private, intimate event, but it comesto involve the whole society in the experience of wonder beforeit returns to the privacy of the domestic space. Albertus Magnus


characterized wonder as like a systole of the heart, and some-thing of this effect of heart-stopping astonishment seems to beproduced in Ales by the ghost of Gy. The ghost in the bedroom isfirst of all a figure of fear, fear to his widow and to the entirecommunity, but he (or it) is also a figure of intense curiosity.Though the return of a dead person arouses terror, the collectiveimpulse is not to flee from and not even simply to ward off theweird apparition, but rather to approach and find out what it is andwhat it wants. Everyone recognizes, however, that this approach hasto be extremely cautious. The community, responding as it mightto an invader from another planet, mobilizes a detachment ofarmed men.Comparable instances of extreme precaution in other recorded

hauntings confirm the dread associated with ghosts, a dread thatevidently led the inhabitants of a village in Brittany, whose de-ceased baker was returning to help his wife and children kneadtheir dough, to smash open his tomb and break the legs of thecorpse.15 As this action suggests, the wandering of ghosts, like thewandering of vagabonds, was central to the fear they aroused. Thisspectral vagrancy, which could in exceptional cases manifest itselfas virtual ubiquity, violated the most fundamental principles ofphysical as well as moral order, and it had to be stopped.16

In his first-person report to the pope, Jean Gobi makes clearthat, as he undertook his investigation, he harbored two principalsuspicions as to the nature of the haunting: fraud (fictitium) anddiabolical illusion (illusio daemonis). It is with regard to this firstsuspicion that he deploys the men, assigning them to search everyinch of the house (including the roof tiles) and the neighboringdwellings, evacuating the nearby inhabitants, and stationingguards in those places where deception was most likely to bestaged: on the solarium above the bedroom where the spectralvoice was heard and on the house’s principal roof beam. The fig-ure hemost suspects of fraud, of course, is the widow, and he there-fore orders an old woman of good reputation to sit with her onthe bed and keep her under surveillance. In the Gast of Gy, by con-trast, all of these precautions have vanished. The prior fears nothuman fiction—the fabrication of a false marvel for some motive


or other, probably pecuniary—but demonic deceit. He does notassume that the uncanny noise is, in all likelihood, a ghost cometo plead for suffrages; he strongly suspects, rather, that it is thedevil up to his old, malevolent tricks.The preparation and deployment of the armed men therefore

are not directed against human deception but against spiritualmenace. The prior accordingly counsels the soldiers to go to con-fession, hear Mass, and receive communion. (Communion, thetext takes care to note, cannot be commanded or dispensed auto-matically, as it were, but is given only to those who elect to take it:“And all that then would housel take / He houseled soon for God’ssake.”17 The men thus purified in spirit are placed in groups ofthree—to honor the Trinity—around the doors and the windowsof the house and in the garden. Meanwhile, the prior has takenfurther measures to shore up his spiritual defenses. He himselfconfesses his sins and then sings a requiem mass. The mass is forall the dead—“For Christian souls both more and less”18—but theprior focuses his spiritual attention on one soul in particular: “Andin his mind then took he Gy / And prayed for him full specially.”19

By so channeling the benefit of the mass, the prior is in effectaddressing in advance the possibility that the ghost of Gy has notbeen sung to rest properly with a requiem.Before he ventures to conjure the spirit, the prior takes one fur-

ther precaution: unbeknownst to anyone else, he hides “God’sbody”—that is, a consecrated wafer—under his clothing. (Theprose version, following the Latin closely, is more specific: “Andthe prior took privily with him that no man wist [knew]: the boxwith God’s flesh and his blood, and hanged it privily before hisbreast under his scapular as worshipfully as he might.”)20 Thus se-cretly as well as publicly armed and defended, he enters the house,accompanied by the two scholars and the household servants. Re-citing prayers and sprinking holy water, he comes to the innermostchamber, where at his request the trembling widow is brought into point out the bed where her husband died. Though crazed withfear, the widow also expresses love for her husband, a love that isall the more striking in the context of a literature that usually veersoff into misogynist complaints about women’s forgetfulness:


The woman was full mazed and mad,She trembled then, so was she rad [frightened];Unto the bed soon she him told [took],The care was at her heart full cold;But in her way yet as she was,She said, “Sir prior, ere ye pass,I pray you for the love of meAnd as in deed of charity,That ye would bid some holy beadAnd make prayers in this steadFor his soul, that noble man.”21

In this moment, the institutional makes contact with the individ-ual: the tangled emotions of a frightened, grieving widow call forthe ritual performance of the religious specialist.In response to the woman’s urgent request, the prior begins to

pray: he reads the Gospel of John and then sits down to recite thespecial prayers for the dead, the Placebo and the Dirige, along withthe seven Penitential Psalms, the litany, and the Agnus Dei. At thethird repetition of the Agnus Dei, they hear “a feeble voice . . . asof a child, saying ‘Amen’ .”22 Though everything about this firstencounter seems designed to offer reassurance—the feeble sound,the child’s voice, and the “Amen” in answer to a prayer that begsthe Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, to havepity on us—the men are all afraid.A manuscript illumination from 1474, attributed to Simon Mar-

mion (the same artist who painted the beautiful scenes from theVision of Tondal), captures the tension of this moment (plate 8).The prior, directly facing the widow, makes an emphatic gesturewith his hands; behind them are four witnesses, three citizens andanother priest. All are staring intently, but their gazes are not di-rected to the same place, for the exact location of the spectral voiceis evidently unclear to them. Two candles burn in brass candle-sticks on a high cabinet covered by a spotless white cloth at theback of the room. The candles are not strictly necessary for light,since the sky, glimpsed through the window next to the cabinet,reveals that it is still day. They suggest, rather, something like an


altar, but there is no religious image behind them, and this is verymuch a domestic interior. To the left there is a carved woodenbench, adorned with matching cover and pillows, on which hasbeen laid two heavy black books, no doubt the prayer books thathave been used to conjure the ghost of Gy. And further to the left,behind the bench, we glimpse the marriage bed, its curtains drawnback. But the center of the scene, remarkably enough, is sheervacancy, the empty space between the prior and the widow.The illuminator brilliantly grasps the essential truth of his text:

it is what has failed to make itself visible, what is only heard, thatlies at the heart of the drama. When in response to the prior’sconjuration, the ghost consents to answer any questions put tohim, as far as he is able, his spectral voice causes all of the armedmen to come running, each with a weapon in his hand, in theexpectation of seeing “some ghastly thing.”23 But there is nothingto see. Bidding themen to be still, the prior then puts to the disem-bodied voice the crucial question: “Art thou an evil ghost or agood?”24

DEBATING WITH THE DEAD

There follows a long, intricate debate that stages some of the mostdifficult issues raised by the Catholic doctrine of the sufferingghosts in Purgatory. This is a theological text quite different fromthe narrative of Owein’s adventures in the Purgatory of Saint Pat-rick. To be sure, the ghost of Gy declares that he is suffering in hot“cleansing fire,” and he describes the foul fiends, grinning andgnashing their teeth, that try to seize upon him and other soulsafter death. But there is no tour of the otherworld, no grisly de-scription of torture chambers with their chains and racks, no dark,stinking river, no heroic tests of faith and endurance imposed onone who would reach the narrow bridge to Heaven. There are alsono skeptics who deny the very existence of Purgatory: the existenceof a middle space between Heaven and Hell is assumed, thoughits precise location is among the issues that are disputed. The mostinsistent question is how to determine whether this ghost is, as heclaims, a denizen of Purgatory, and behind the question is an at-


tempt to sort out the precise moral meaning of that middle spaceand the best method to relieve the sufferings of those who arecondemned to spend time there. These are problems that greatlyexercised theologians, but The Gast of Gy gives them an unusualdramatic force by emphasizing the wary skepticism of the priorand, still more, as we shall see, by turning the debate into an un-usual love story.To the question of whether he is a good or evil ghost, the spirit

of Gy gives a double answer. “I am the gast of Gy,” he declares “witheger mode [passionate intensity],” and proceeds to propound whatis in effect a syllogism. I, the ghost of Gy, am a creature of God;God looked upon all he had created and saw it was good; ergo, “Iam a good ghost.”25 At the same time, he adds, “I am evil for mineevil deed”26 and hence must suffer pain. Therefore, as the prosetranslation puts it bluntly, “I am a wicked ghost,” adding as an ex-planatory afterthought, “as unto my wicked pain that I suffer.”27

The prior quickly concludes that this ambiguous answer provesthat the ghost is unambiguously wicked, for if he were good, hecould never characterize his pain as wicked.

All pain is good (that prove I thee)That ordained is in good degree.28

This is the first of a succession of exchanges in which the priorshows that he is clever, skeptical, and sharp, that he has a learnedinterest in doctrinal distinctions, that he has a fine prosecutor’s eyefor contradictions in testimony, but also that he is limited, rigid,insensitive to human and spiritual suffering, and repeatedly, evenembarrassingly wrong. The ghost readily concedes that from thepoint of view of God the pain that he is suffering is good, for it isjustly given by divine judgment in punishment for his sins. But thepain is nevertheless ill to him to whom it is given—only a theolo-gian comfortably abstracted from the reality of suffering couldblithely call it “good.” What the ghost actually experiences is un-mistakably “evil pain,” justly inflicted upon him for his evil deeds,and therefore, until such time as he is cleansed, men may call himan “evil spirit.”


The primacy of experience is reaffirmed when the prior asks theghost to disclose the identity of some of the souls in Heaven andsome of those in Hell—to give him, in effect, what Dante (likeTondal and others) so unforgettably provides. But Gy cannotoblige: someone who has actually been in those places would beable truthfully to give such a report, but no soul in Purgatory couldpossibly do so. For though he is destined for Heaven, he has notyet attained it, and though he is suffering, his torments do not takeplace in Hell: “I was never there nor never shall be.”29 The prior isonce again certain that he has caught the ghost in a lie, one thatwill expose his fiendish nature. For, he observes, though the He-brew prophets were men of flesh and blood, they nonetheless wereable to speak openly—“in field and town”—of Christ’s incarnation,death, and resurrection, events that they never saw with their owneyes. Surely, a “clean spirit,” as the ghost claims to be, should beable to see still more than these mere mortals could. But the ghostreplies that the prior is wasting his words, for there is no likenessbetween prophets and souls in Purgatory. The former were giventhe gift of the Holy Spirit, so that they could preach of what hadnot yet come to pass; the latter have no such gift. They are simplyset to suffer “for certain space” until their sins are cleansed.30 Nomiraculous visions are granted them; the only angels that the ghosthimself has seen are those who are his keepers, and they will tellhim nothing until he is brought out of his pain.The prior is more convinced than ever that he has caught the

ghost in a trap, for “books bear witness” (line 503) that spirits, andeven fiends, sometimes tell mortal men who is saved and who isdamned. But the ghost replies that neither spirits nor fiends havethe power to disclose anything that touches on the “privities ofheaven,” unless God authorizes it or an angel chances to mentionit. As the angels he has encountered have told him nothing, he hasno way of knowing who is in Heaven; and as there is “no likeness totell / Betweenme and the fiends in hell,” he has no way of knowingwho is eternally damned.31 “I pray thee now, / Tell me,” the priorthen abruptly asks, in the manner of a wily prosecutor springing atrap, “In what stead art thou?” (lines 525–26). When the disem-


bodied voice replies, “I am here in Purgatory,” the prior declares,with heavy irony, that the ghost is telling him that this place, thebedroom in Ales, is the place where the souls of all the dead arebeing purged in terrible fires. But the ghost has an answer to thisobvious absurdity: there are two purgatories, one common and theother individual (or “departable”).32

DOUBLE PURGATORIES

This is a surprise revelation, and one of doubtful orthodoxy. In thesixth century Gregory the Great taught that the souls of the deadwould endure Purgatory on this earth. He tells the story of a priestwho went frequently to the baths—this was still a world in closecontact with the culture of ancient Rome—and one day offered tothe bathhouse attendant the gift of two loaves of bread. The atten-dant sadly declined the gift, explaining that he could not eat itbecause he was in fact dead: “In the form in which you see me nowI used to be in charge of these baths and because of my sins I havebeen sent back here after my death.”33 To be of any help, he addedbefore disappearing, the food should be offered to God and notto him. The priest obliged and was gratified, when he returned tothe baths after a week of masses, to find that the attendant hadvanished, presumably because he had completed his term of suf-fering. In this very early conception, then, souls are compelled toreturn for their purgatorial suffering to the places where they hadmost sinned. But the church had gradually abandoned Gregory’svision of the afterlife, and by the early fourteenth century, whenthe spirit of Gy returned to his house in Ales, souls condemned toPurgatory should all by rights have been doctrinally penned up inthe single enormous prison house.34

Hence when the ghost tells Jean Gobi that he is suffering in twodistinct purgatories, the prior declares flatly that he is a liar, for heobviously cannot be here in familiar human surroundings and atthe same time burning with the other suffering souls in “common”Purgatory. True, the ghost agrees, but he is not telling a “fable” orclaiming to be in two places at once: by day he is condemned tosuffer in the bedroom; by night he is confined in fire with all the


other souls. (Both the verse and the prose English texts, for somereason, reverse the temporal scheme of the Latin source, whichspecifies that the ghost haunts the bedroom at night and is pennedup in common Purgatory during the day.) The afterlife by thisaccount does not necessarily mark the immediate severing of allrelations to the familiar spaces of this world. The dead have de-parted; their souls have gone off to other realms, and their bodiesare beginning to decompose. But, in the immediate wake of hisdeath, the ghost of Gy and his anguished widow are in daily contactin the very place where they were most intimate. For this contactto achieve a coherent meaning, it evidently must be mediated bythe church—by herself the widow was not able to make out anywords that the ghost might have been speaking, not even his name,but heard only frightening sounds—yet it is not contained by theecclesiastical setting or doctrinal orthodoxy.35

There is one further dispute about the location of Purgatory.When the ghost declares that common Purgatory is located in thecenter of the earth, the prior challenges him on the grounds thatit is impossible for two distinct places (here, “the midst of theearth,” and common Purgatory) to exist in the same geographicallocation. The problem once again is with a violation of the elemen-tary laws of physics, and the challenge thus voices at least a touchof rational skepticism about the existence of Purgatory. But, as be-fits a question asked by a churchman who does not actually doubtits existence, skepticism is staged in such a way as to be easily an-swerable. The ghost replies that physical and spiritual realms cancoexist in the same place, just as the body and soul coexist in asingle person, and then—as if uneasy with the highly unorthodoxspiritualization of Purgatory that this answer potentially implies—he shifts to a different kind of orderly coexistence, entirely physicalin character: rain, hail, sleet, and snow may all exist together inthe same air.Accounts of Purgatory, as we have already seen, repeatedly grap-

ple with the belatedness of the doctrine and the evident difficultythat many people had in believing it. How is it possible to makethe complex mental construct seem compellingly real and to con-fer on the gossamer, insubstantial image of souls an illusion of ma-


teriality? Unlike the Owayne Miles, The Gast of Gy does not depictthe confounding of the mockery of infidels, nor does it attempt torepresent in gruesome detail the agonies of the condemned. Onthe contrary, the ghost never assumes material form. The strategyinstead is to represent doubts: Is the voice that of a purgatorialspirit or a demon? Can there be two distinct purgatorial spaces?How much does a soul in Purgatory actually know, and when doeshe come to know it? The doubts are never permitted to underminethe existence of Purgatory; indeed, they implicitly affirm the realityof the main territory by skirmishing fiercely around its periphery.Thus the debate never turns directly on whether Purgatory ex-

ists, and it veers away from a discussion of its precise location—theprior evidently coming to accept the existence of a doublesphere—to the best means of alleviating the pain of souls con-demned to suffer there. The ghost expounds upon the relativemerits of prayer, fasting, alms, and the gracious intercession ofMary, “the empress of hell.”36 Above all, he extols the efficacy ofChrist’s Passion—that is, of the Mass—in mitigating suffering. Dosouls know what is done for them by the living, the prior asks, towhich the ghost replies that they do. Then, the prior demands,resuming his best prosecutorial manner, Can you say what Mass Isang today? “Thou sang of Saint Spirit,” the ghost answers. Onceagain the prior pounces, certain that he has caught the voice in alie: he sang not the Mass of the Holy Spirit but a requiem mass.And once again the ghost, insisting that he is not a liar, appealsto an existential reality that is beyond the grasp of his inquisitor.It is true enough, he concedes, that it was a requiem, but theprior should know that when you ask a person a question, the an-swer that comes most quickly from the mouth is what lies nearestthe heart.37 In his life on earth, scrambling after worldly wealth, hehad most offended the Holy Spirit, the ghost explains, and there-fore he stands most in need of prayers that directly compensatefor this offense. When the prior sang today’s mass, he added aprayer to the Holy Spirit, and it was this prayer, more than all ofthe others that he recited, that actually gave the ghost some direct,personal comfort. Hence, the voice concludes, his answer was notat all a lie.38


What is at stake in this sparring? The putative issue is the attemptto determine whether the spirit in the bedroom at Ales is good orevil, but after the prior’s suspicions have been repeatedly dashed,the case inevitably begins to seem closed. (There can be no abso-lute certainty, of course, only a tissue of probabilities.) Yet the de-bate goes on and on long after most readers will have come to theconclusion that they can, in Hamlet’s phrase, take this ghost’s wordfor a thousand pounds. Something else seems to be motivating theargument. In part it addresses, with subtle indirection, the linger-ing skeptical doubts that laymen—the “lewd men” for whom thework was written—must have had about the whole elaborate busi-ness. Hence the prior asks the voice how it is possible for a ghost,having no body, to suffer in flames, a form of suffering that couldafflict only flesh-and-blood creatures. This is the kind of ques-tion—as distinct from inquiries about which prayers are most effi-cacious—that reason and common sense would advance not onlyagainst the doctrine of Purgatory in particular but also against anyclaim that the souls of the dead can experience physical pain orpleasure. The fact that the predictable, perfectly orthodox answersto such questions come directly from the ghost, rather than fromthe official representative of the church, gives them a rhetoricaledge in allaying skepticism.Late in the dialogue it seems finally to strike the prior that he

has been bending his eye on vacancy, to paraphrase Gertrude inHamlet, and holding discourse with the incorporeal air. “I marvelme,” he says to the disembodied voice,

How thou to speak has such pouste [power]And has no tongue nor other thing,That instrument is of speaking.

(Lines 1511–14)

The ghost concedes that just as a carpenter cannot cut wood with-out an ax, so a human being cannot speak without a tongue. Butsuch tools—axes and tongues—are used only as a result of an in-tention to use them, that is, an immaterial impulse given to thebody by the invisible soul. Therefore, if the body is but an instru-ment of the soul, in which “virtue, might, and mind” actually re-


side, then after death the soul may find the power to speak prop-erly without the help of the body. Then, as if slightly uneasy withthe vagueness of this explanation and casting about for another,more decisive way to show the prior that his “saws are false,” theghost adds that, after all, the Holy Writ plainly witnesses that Godand his angels bright speak wisely, and they do not have mouthsor tongues. The dogmatic incontestability of Scripture closes thisparticular question.This overarching strategy—the ceding of authority from the

prior to the ghost, in order to recast institutional dogma as first-hand experience—is apparent at many points in the debate; in-deed, as the prior loses argument after argument, it comes to seemone of its most striking characteristics. Yet the ghost appears tobe something more than a conventional spokesman for doctrinalcorrectness. As we have already seen, his presence in the bedroomentails the elaboration of a double Purgatory that sits awkwardlywith church orthodoxy. If there is a rhetorical advantage to theinsistence on the superiority of the ghost’s existential stringencyover the prior’s institutional knowledge, the persuasive power ispurchased at a fairly high price: the prior’s specialized knowledge,his mastery of the discretio spirituum, is revealed to be a rather fee-ble, unreliable instrument for determining the nature and originof ghosts.More than seventeen hundred lines into a poem of some two

thousand lines, the interrogator is still expressing variations ondoubts that he had already many times articulated and that hadeach time been forcefully answered. Of course, these doubts couldbe seen as an admirable manifestation of the prior’s proper wari-ness—the institution cannot let down its guard—but the spectervoices impatience that it is difficult for the reader not to share.Since you claim, the prior tells the ghost, that you are always inflames,

Then think me, that this house and weShould burn all for the fire of thee,Since that it is so hot and keen.

(Lines 1753–55)


The whole course of the work insists that we share in the ghost’sexasperation: “Now is well seen,” he replies, “That in thee is fulllittle skill” (lines 1756–57).He had just finished answering the same question, the spectral

voice complains—“right now told I thee”—and he does not con-ceal his frustration when he reiterates the explanation. “But, cer-tainly, this shalt thou understand,” he concludes, as if talking to aparticularly slow learner,

If all houses in every landIn a place were burning sheer,It might not be so hot a fireAs I now suffer night and day.

(Lines 1782–85)

Once again the ghost’s actual experience is set against a merelytheoretical, abstract doubt. There turns out to be nothing in theprior’s imposing institutional position that gives him a privilegedinsight into the afterlife.This surprising limitation is made explicit when the prior asks

the ghost what “manner of folk” is revealed in Purgatory to havelived the best lives. One might anticipate an answer in praise ofclerics or cloistered monks and nuns, or at least those who practicecelibacy, but the ghost does not respond by celebrating any particu-lar mode of life. It is impossible to determine in this world, he says,whether a man’s works will be judged evil or good, worthy of joyor pain. The prior is evidently dissatisfied with this answer and asksagain “which is the most perfect degree / Of all” earthly profes-sions (lines 1664–65).

“In every state I see,” he says,“Some things to lack [to fault] and some to praise;Therefore I will praise no degree,Nor none shall be dispraised for me.”

(Lines 1667–70)

All men in all places, he concludes, should “serve God with all theirmight, / In what degree so they be dight” (lines 1673–74).


This refusal to grant special praise to the religious is intensifiedwhen, in response to the prior’s question, the ghost names threesins that God most sternly and immediately punishes. The first ofthese is cohabitation without the sacrament of the holy church;the third is manslaughter conjoined with perjury. The second isleft discretely unspecified, “But clerks full kindly know it may” (line1850), that is, churchmen by their nature may know it. The appar-ent discretion is, of course, only an invitation to the reader to fillin the blank with one or another clerical sin: simony, sodomy, for-nication. The charge casts a shadow over the clergy, a shadow thatdarkens as the work nears its conclusion.

“TELL US SOME MARVEL”

After responding to the lengthy series of questions, the ghost fi-nally disappears, leaving his widow with the parting injunction thatshe live in chastity, and that she celebrate for her own soul and forhim three hundred masses: one hundred dedicated to the Trinityor the Holy Spirit, one hundred to the Virgin, fifty to Saint Peterand fifty requiem masses. Hastening to carry out his instructions,the widow immediately employs all of the priests, monks, and friarsof the town to sing the multiple masses all on a single day, and shealso arranges for a priest to sing daily masses for her husband’ssoul until Easter. These measures seem to be effective: she is nolonger tormented by the ghost. But she remains terrified and doesnot dare to enter her bedchamber. Therefore, twelve days afterChristmas, on the Feast of the Epiphany, she consults once againwith the prior, who decides to return to the house, this time in thecompany of twenty Augustinian and Minorite friars. Singing thePlacebo and theDirige and intoning the words “Requiescant in pace”(as if they feared that there was more than one specter), they be-come aware of the ghost, whose presence in the bedroom is sig-naled by the sound of a broom sweeping across the pavement. Thefriars are frightened, but once again the voice is meek, like that ofa man who “had been sick.” With the exhaustion and queru-lousness of such a person, the ghost asks why the prior and hiscompanions are once again disturbing him:


It is not long, since I told theeAll that thou would ask of me.What should I now say to you here?

(Lines 1969–71)

The prior asks him for a sign or a wonder. He has gathered, hesays, friars and other folk to bear witness so that they can “declare”the case before the pope. “And therefore,” he adds, “tell us somemarvel, / That we may trow withouten fail” (lines 2001–2). Theghost responds with barely suppressed anger: “I am not God,” hesays, and only God and his angels can perform marvels. But, hecontinues, if they wish to preach better than they have before, theyshould speak out most especially “[a]gainst the sin of simony” (line2012). It is as if churchmen preaching against their own abuseswould be the greatest marvel that the ghost could tell those whohave come to interrogate him.There follows a longer list of sins, but the rhetorical effect of

beginning here, with the clerical traffic in sacred things, is unset-tling. This is the culmination of the steady erosion of the prior’sposition, the gradual evacuation of the discretio spirituum, and thetransfer of moral authority from the powerful cleric to the misera-ble ghost. The transfer, as I have suggested, may serve a strategicpurpose, affirming the reality of Purgatory through the testimonyof the ghost rather than the pronouncements of the church, butit is difficult to believe that this is its only purpose.Something seems to have happened in the passage from Jean

Gobi’s deposition to The Gast of Gy. Most obviously, the work hasgreatly expanded in length, which enables it to explore a range oftheological issues related to the afterlife and to the invisible powersabout which the ghost can claim to testify with eyewitness authority.Hence, for example, the dialogue addresses the question, muchdebated in the church, of whether a demon can interfere with theconsecration of the Host by exploiting the weaknesses of sinfulpriests, and the still more vexed question of whether souls afterdeath would be immediately granted the Beatific Vision or wouldhave to wait until their ascension to Heaven.39 But the sheer num-ber of vernacular translations suggests that the interest of the


longer work extended well beyond a clerical audience, and thisbroader reach is perhaps linked to the weakening of the prior’sauthority and the assault on clerical abuses that we have re-marked.40

Did early readers consciously perceive these subversive features?It is possible that the strategy of attributing the crucial doctrinalclaims to the ghost rather than to the prior necessarily weakenedthe power of the interrogator and unleashed critical elements with-out entailing an explicitly satirical stance toward the clerical hierar-chy. The attacks on the prior for his lack of skill and even the jibesat the priesthood for sodomy and simony could be relished withoutbeing altogether acknowleged.Yet an odd feature of the Queen’s College, Oxford, manuscript

in which the prose version of The Gast of Gy is found suggests thatthere may have been some more conscious recognition of the het-erodox elements: at the end of the text the fourteenth-centuryscribe (“Jenkyn by name,” as he signs himself) wrote the wordsExplicit Johannes Mandeville. John Mandeville was the presumed au-thor of one of the most brilliantly disquieting works of the period,Mandeville’s Travels, a version of which is adjacent in the Queen’sCollege manuscript to The Gast of Gy. The adjacency may simplyhave confused the scribe: the author of a veiled antipapal satire,as the editor of The Gast of Gy remarks, “would hardly be the writeror translator of a serious religious tract.”41 But, alternatively, thescribe may have noticed in the religious tract he had just copied asatirical strain that linked it in his mind to a travel book whoseeyewitness account of distant lands allowed its author a compara-ble license to criticize and unsettle.It would be a mistake to exaggerate the anticlerical implications:

The Gast of Gy is a pious work that confirms both the overarchingclaim that Purgatory exists and the particular claim that certainrituals of the Catholic Church possess the power directly to relievethe sufferings of imprisoned souls. The dialogue with the ghostmanifests nothing of the skeptical relativism and surprising toler-ance articulated in Mandeville’s Travels. On the contrary, when theprior asks why God allows Saracens, Jews, and pagans to exist, theghost replies that their existence permits Christians to fight against


them and thereby make manifest a commitment to the true faith.That faith is securely lodged within the “holy church” (lines 1129,1844, etc.): what most vexes the fiends of Hell, the ghost declares,is the sacrament of God’s Body, and what most comforts souls inpain are masses and prayers recited by priests. The immediate effi-cacy of these prayers is vividly demonstrated when, after providinga long series of answers, the ghost urges that any further questionsbe asked quickly, for the time is fast approaching when he must go“to suffer pains in other place” (line 1208). The prior charitablyasks if there is anything that he and the rest of the company cando to provide relief, and the ghost replies that “the five joys of OurLady” might be a great help. After the prior and his fellows kneeland devoutly recite the prayers—“ ‘Gaude virgo, mater Christi’ /With the five verses following fully” (lines 1221–22)—the ghostresponds as if he has been given a fast-acting medicine:

. . . “Well have ye comforteth me:My pain is somedeal passed now,That I may better speak with you.”

(Lines 1226–28)

The particularity of the ghost’s request is important here, for it isnot only the general efficacy of prayer that is established by TheGast of Gy but the specific needs of suffering souls. Beneath theumbrella of the discretio spirituum, what much of the dialogue isstruggling to tease out is the vexed relation between the overarch-ing category of the souls of the dead, pent up en masse in Purga-tory, and individual souls, those recently deceased family membersand friends whose voices still echo in the ears of their loved ones.In principle there is no apparent reason why a good Christianshould not care equally for all of the virtuous dead, or why thechurch should not strive evenhandedly to relieve the sufferingsof all Christian souls. But, while it concedes that the dead have acollective claim to attention, The Gast of Gy gives powerful expres-sion to a very different sense, one based on the spiritual specificityof sin and guilt and the psychological specificity of grief.From time to time the reader is reminded that there is a “com-

mon Purgatory” where the ghost suffers in the company of millions


of others, but the work stresses Gy’s special, highly individuatedplace of torment. As we have already seen, out of all the prayers inthe Mass that the prior has sung that day, the ghost seizes uponthose to the Holy Spirit, since those are the prayers he particularlyneeds, but the issue is addressed more directly. In singing Mass,the ghost explains, a priest should pray first “specially for hisfriends’ sake” (line 968) and then, after he has helped those towhom he is “most holden,” he should pray for everyone. Thus, headds by way of illustration, he himself has been freed of four yearsof penance as a result of prayers made on his behalf by a cousin, apoor friar, whom he had helped, when he was still in life. Thanksto his friend’s kindness, he will be finished with his term of suffer-ing at Easter.The prior seems to have some difficulty grasping the principle

of individuation. What helps most to hasten a soul out of Purga-tory? he asks again, to which the ghost replies that masses said byholy men, especially masses dedicated to the Virgin, are particu-larly effective. The answer disquiets the prior: the Office of theDead, he says, was therefore “made in vain,” since other massesare evidently of more avail than the requiem mass. No, the voiceexplains, the requiem is useful “when any men for all will pray”(line 1036); it was instituted for “lewd men here in land” (line1037) who fail to understand that souls need other, special prayers.When the prior, pursuing the issue in an attempt to get more de-tails, asks whether mortals help when they recite the Placebo andthe Dirige, two sequences of psalms and anthems, the ghost eruptswith passionate eagerness, as if his interlocutor has finally hit onsomething important:

The voice answered him on high(With great force out gan he burst)And said: “Ah, prior, and thou wist,How greatly that it may them gain,Then hope I, that thou would be fainOft for to bid that blessed beadFor thy friends, that are dead.

(Lines 1096–1102)


What excites the ghost is less that these prayers have general valid-ity than that their many individual parts include virtually all of thepossible categories in which particular souls in Purgatory may findthemselves: young or old, poor or powerful, virgin or married orwidowed, in holy orders or “lewd.” There is something in them foreveryone: “In which degree so he is in, / Their lessons shall towealth him win” (lines 1141–42).Prayers here do not function principally as expressions of the

piety of the cleric or congregant; they function as spiritual medi-cines charitably donated to souls in pain. And eachmedicine worksbest when it is sharply focused on a particular ailment afflicting aparticular person. Hence the priest is encouraged to have specificsouls in mind when he prays, and hence too those prayers are mosteffective that directly address the specific sins that these souls arecondemned to expiate. The spiritual disposition of the priest is nomore relevant to the cure than the spiritual disposition of a physi-cian would be to the efficacy of his prescriptions. To be sure, theghost notes in answer to one of the prior’s questions, the inwardstate of a priest is relevant to his ability to perform the Mass, forunclean thoughts and deadly sins enable fiends to interfere andmar the proper “making” of God’s Body. But this is only to say thatthe most precious medicine must be well and cleanly made.The discussion of the Mass gives the prior—who, unbeknownst

to everyone, has a consecrated Host hidden under his scapular—the occasion to ask one of his most sly prosecutorial questions:since the time that the ghost went “out of this world,” has he everseen “that solemn sight” (line 1294) of the sacrament? “Yea,” thevoice replies,

“I see it yet,For on thy breast thou bears it;In a box thou hast it brought.”

(Lines 1297–99)

The entire company is astonished, but the prior is not willing toconcede the accuracy of the ghost’s spiritual vision: if the ghostknew that “God’s Body” was hidden in the box, why didn’t he, as


one of God’s creatures, do honor to it? “I have it honored in mykind,” the voice responds with quiet dignity,

“With all my might and all my mind,Since first that thou it hither brought,All if thou perceived it not.”

(Lines 1311–14)

What follows is the most dramatic moment in the dialogue, themoment in which the complicated theological debate turns deci-sively into an exorcism. The prior takes the sacrament “out of hisclothes, where it was laid,” and says that if the ghost actually be-lieves that this is God’s Body, then he must submit to its power. “Icommand thee,” the prior continues, to “go with me plain pace”(line 1325) to the outermost gate of this place and hence to leavethe house. The ghost, who has until this point remained singularlyindependent of the prior’s power, concedes that he is “bound,”but not, he adds, “to follow thy person.” Rather, “with my lord fainwill I wend / that thou holdest betwixt thy hands” (lines 1329–30).Carrying the consecrated wafer, the prior then proceeds towardthe gate. He is able to see nothing, but once again he hears comingafter him a noise like that of a broom sweeping a pavement. At hiscommand that the ghost show himself, there is only silence.

THE SECRET

The route toward the gate passes through the bedroom. As theprior and the ghost approach the bed on which the widow is lying,the woman begins to gnash her teeth, grimace, and cry aloud asif she were mad, before falling into a swoon. In the comparablescene in the deposition, Jean Gobi reports that her terror in effectbroke the sacred spell through which he was leading the ghostto the door. In the silence after she faints, the prior and his com-panions hear a voice lamenting as it passes through the house,and then for the remainder of the night, they hear nothing. In TheGast of Gy, by contrast, the scene of panic leads to a renewal ofthe very personal questioning with which the prior had begun hisinterrogation.


Just after the ghost identified himself by name, the prior hadaccused him of slandering himself and his wife: during his life, heand his wife were deemed to be “true in faith, of noble fame” (line293), but now lewd folk—the people who in every land say thatevil spirits walk abroad—will conclude that “Gy was evil in all hislife, / And therefore torments he his wife” (lines 297–98). Gy re-sponds that he has slandered neither his wife nor his body. Hesuggests that the prior should imagine someone who borrows acoat and then suffers horrible pain on its account: just so, the spirithas used Gy’s body as its clothing and is now enduring tormentsas a consequence of that body’s wickedness. The body itself—deadand buried—is not suffering at all, but it will share in the blissthat lies at the end of the purgatorial imprisonment, so the soul isanything but unkind.Why, the prior goes on to ask, is the ghost condemned to suffer

some of his pains in the house where he lived? “For in this place Isinned most” (line 592), the voice replies, adding that since,though he was shriven, he performed no penance during his life-time, he must now do penance for his sin. Ordinarily so wary andsuspicious, the prior had seemed contented with these answers,and the dialogue shifted to theological matters. But now, with thewidow writhing in fear on the bed, he resumes the intimate interro-gation. Invoking Christ’s Passion, the prior demands to be told“why it is and for what thing” (line 1369) the ghost is tormentinghis wife. The voice replies that she knows the answer as well as he.The prior then turns to the widow:

“In the name of God, dame, I thee pray,Tell unto me all thy thought.”And she lay still and answered not.

(Lines 1376–78)

The woman’s distress is so intense that many of those standingaround her bed weep for her, as she begins to crawl on her kneesand to cry out to Jesus to help her.The spectacle only intensifies the prior’s determination to dis-

cover the reason for the haunting. “Why is thy wife thus travailedhere?” he demands of the ghost. The voice once again redirects


the question away from himself: I told you just now, he says, that sheknows the answer, and if you want to know more, then “Ask herself;she can thee say” (line 1396). The prior gazes at the woman andurges her to speak frankly to him, promising to help her:

“To save thyself of sare [sorrow]Tell me the cause of all thy care,And out of bale I shall thee bring.”

(Lines 1399–1401)

But the cause remains a secret—“She lay and answered him noth-ing” (line 1402)—and the frustrated interrogator stands as oneamazed.At this point of impasse, with his personal prestige and the spiri-

tual power of his institution at stake, the prior musters a tremen-dous conjuration. By God’s might and power, he intones, and bythe virtue of his body and of his mother, mild Mary, and by thesweet milk he sucked from her, and by the tears she shed when shesaw that her son was slain, and by all hallows, tell me the precisetruth—“the certain sooth”—of this marvel. Tell me “why thy wifehas all this pain” (line 1415). At last he gets at least a partial answer:their mutual suffering is for “an unkindly sin,” that is, a sin againstkind, that they committed together “here in this stead.” But whatwas the sin, the prior urgently asks, so that married couples can bewarned not to commit it in deed or thought? The ghost refuses toanswer, not because he resists the power of the church but becausehe is obedient to a higher power than his interrogator possesses.God does not wish the sin to be revealed, the voice says, becausethe wife and her husband, while he was still alive, had both con-fessed and received absolution for it, though they have not yetcompleted their penance. God has forgiven their sin—it has ineffect been erased—and it would be a violation of the sanctity ofconfession to disclose it now. But the ghost can say one thing tomarried couples: let them always keep “the rule of wedding” and“duly do both day and night” (lines 1445–46).What is it that they have done? Taken too much pleasure in the

marriage bed? Or the wrong kind of pleasure? Or—in light of thefact that this is a work that makes no mention of any children—


have they contrived to prevent conception or to terminate preg-nancy? Somewhere perhaps behind The Gast of Gy is one of thefoundational stories of Purgatory, a story rehearsed in the MiddleEnglish versions of the popular Trental of St. Gregory. The motherof a certain pope, we are told, had committed lechery as a youngwoman and had murdered her child. She felt remorse, but as shewas the pope’s mother, she was ashamed to reveal her sin to herconfessor. When she died, the pope, celebrating Mass, saw a crea-ture emerging from a strange, uncanny darkness:

So ragged, so twisted, so dreary, so evil,As hideous to behold as hell-devil;Mouth and nose, ears and eyes,Flamed all full of fury lies.42

The pope asks who this hideous creature is, and she replies thatshe is his mother. She confesses her crime and says she can bedelivered by “a true Trental / Of ten chief feasts of all the year.”43

Gregory performs the cycle of thirty masses for the dead and atthe end of twelve months he sees a comely lady dressed andcrowned like a queen. He thinks she is the Virgin, but in fact sheis his mother, newly delivered from Purgatory.44

In The Gast of Gy, as in the story of Gregory the Great’s mother,an “unkindly sin” leads to a haunting. But Gy and his wife are infar less dire circumstances, for they have been shriven, and theyare spared the shame of public disclosure. The prior’s failure todiscover the precise nature of the sin is a tribute to the efficacyand the privacy of confession. It is not, of course, that the churchis excluded from the secrets of the marriage bed; on the contrary,the work stages in dramatic terms the legitimacy of its interest inthe married couple’s most intimate secrets and shameful acts.Moreover, the very refusal to disclose the details produces a certaininvasive power of implication, as if it were inviting all readers tobring to confession any act that might possibly fall outside the dis-creetly unspecified “rule of wedding.” Yet the preservation of thesecret also turns the work’s attention away from the public, visibleinstitution and directs it instead at the intimate bond between thedeceased husband and his grieving widow.


The focus on this bond is the culmination of the strategy thatwe have repeatedly noted in The Gast of Gy, its insistence on thepersonal, the particular, and the experiential against the more ab-stract and theoretical concerns of the clerical interrogator. At themoment when the ghost and his widow refuse to reveal their sin,they turn to one another and speak directly, without the mediationof the prior. “Good Gy, for love of me,” the woman says, weepingas she lies on the marriage bed, “say if I shall saved be” (lines 1459–60). Will she suffer forever for the sin they committed, she asks, asin for which God was “not paid”? The ghost comforts her: thepenance is nearing its end, he says; “thou shall be saved for certain”(line 1467). The prior now intervenes to reclaim control of thediscourse by channeling this reassurance of salvation toward thepractice of piety: he tells the woman that she should give alms everyday, for alms “may sins waste.” The ghost characteristically person-alizes this counsel by telling his wife that when she gives these alms,she should “think on me” (line 1478).Something about this request—the ghost’s attempt to find some

relief of his pain directly through the pious thoughts of his wife—seems to nettle the prior. Why did the ghost not come with thestory of his life to “men of religion,” he demands, rather than tohis wife, since he must know perfectly well that such men werewiser and better at praying to God than women were? The ghost’sresponse is the clearest, most powerful statement in the poem ofthe primacy of the personal and the intimate:

The voice answered then unto thisAnd said: “I loved more my wifeThan any other man alive,And therefore first to her I went.”

(Lines 1488–91)

The loss of all of his worldly possessions, the crossing of the bound-ary between life and death, the encounter with vengeful fiends,the dismaying recognition of the sins of his flesh, the commence-ment of unspeakable torments—none of these ghastly experienceshas severed his deepest mortal passion: “I loved more my wife /Than any other man alive.” Hence in his pain he turns not to the


spiritual experts—priests and monks and friars—to whom hemight appeal for succor; he turns to the woman he loved.45

“Think on me,” he entreats her, when she performs deeds ofcharity, and that will “allay some of my pain” (line 1479). Being“thought on” by his wife or by any other living person is not simplya matter of sentimental remembrance; rather, it is an active mem-ory, the directing of a beam of spiritual healing through the powerof mental concentration. But it is not in order to be thus remem-bered and to obtain suffrages that the ghost is haunting his widow’sbedroom. Rather, he says, when he was condemned to suffer pen-ance in this place, he asked God’s permission to warn his wife, sothat she could escape what he is now forced to endure. God gra-ciously gave him leave “for to grieve / And for to torment her”(lines 1498–99). For what looks like cruelty—the terrible fear thathe has aroused in her, the writhing, screams, and grimaces that hispresence has provoked—is in fact the purest expression of his love.Only by suffering pain for her sins here and now in this life, as aresult of his intervention, can his wife be spared the horrible suffer-ing he is experiencing in the afterlife.This, then, is the psychological and emotional logic of Purga-

tory, as depicted by The Gast of Gy. The church, with its clericalhierarchies, its specialized knowledge of prayer, its elaborate ritu-als, and above all its miraculous ability to make God’s Body, is mas-sively present. Without the powerful conjuring of the prior therewould be only vague terror at the sound of a broom scraping alongthe ground. Yet the center around which this enormous institu-tional structure is deployed is not the high altar in the church orthe papal court of Avignon or the royal throne; it is the bedroomin a bourgeois house in a provincial town. That is, the symboliccore is the relationship between a husband and a wife. That rela-tionship involves guilty secrets as well as love: the couple sharethe knowledge of something they have done against the “rule” ofmarriage, and this knowledge continues, along with their love,after they have been severed by the hand of death. The agony Gysuffers in his bedroom is the direct consequence of the namelesssin that he has committed there with his wife, and his wife is terri-fied that after death she will suffer the fate of her husband. But


the haunting that increases her terror is also the key to a releasefrom it. Her intense psychological distress now will obviate latertorment, and the alms that she gives in her husband’s memory willnot only allay some of his pain but also will work to cancel herown sins. The doctrine of Purgatory, in this account, is a way oforganizing, articulating, and making sense of a tangle of intense,intimate feelings in the wake of a loved one’s death: longing, re-gret, guilt, fear, anger, and grief.46

Surviving manuscripts suggest that The Gast of Gy had its greatestimpact in the fourteenth century, though the gorgeous illumi-nated copy was produced for Margaret of York as late as 1474.Around 1500, a Scots writer, possibly William Dunbar, wrote ashort comic interlude called The Droichis [Dwarf’s] Part of the Play,which is said to be the earliest extant specimen of dramatic versein Scots.47 “Hiry, hary, hubbilschow!” the dwarf declares as he strutsonto the scene, claiming that he is a giant who can wrestle withbears. Eventually, he will identify himself as “Wealth,” accompa-nied by his three boon companions, Welfare, Wantonness, andPlay, but before he reveals his name, he plays with several othershapes he claims that he has assumed during his immensely longexistence. I am “the naked Blind Harry,” he says, who has longbeen among “ferlys” in faery land, or a sergeant out of Sultan-land,or—yet another alternative shape—“the spirit of Gy.”In the early sixteenth century, then, the ghost who had appeared

almost three hundred years earlier in the south of France was stillsufficiently well-known that he could be lightly alluded to—linkedto the fabulous and the exotic—in a popular entertainment. Hisrenown evidently long continued, at least in Scottish circles: a cen-tury later, David Lyndsay relates that in his youth he amused KingJames V, sometimes singing and dancing, sometimes “playingfarces on the floor,”

And sometimes like a fiend, transfiguredAnd sometimes like the grisly Gast of Gy;In diverse forms oftimes disfigured,And sometimes disguised full pleasantly.48


“Sometimes like the grisy Gast of Gy”: the poor, disembodiedvoice of the purgatorial spirit who loved his wife has become enter-tainment.

THE SOULS’ BOOK

By the middle of the sixteenth century Christendom had decisivelyruptured, and in England the state church had moved to abolishthe whole elaborate system of suffrages, offerings, chantries, re-quiem masses and other means to assist the dead in their pain. Acentury later Hobbes could write coolly that “all the histories ofapparitions and ghosts alleged by the doctors of the RomanChurch” are “old wives’ fables.”49 How did it all come to an end?How were the dead killed off? And did they go quietly?Let us return to Simon Fish’s Supplication for the Beggars. JohnFoxe, the Protestant martyrologist, offers two different accounts ofhow Fish’s incendiary tract reached the hands of Henry VIII. Inone account, the king was conversing with his footman, EdmundModdys, when their talk turned to religion and “the new booksthat were come from beyond the seas.” Moddys offered to put theking in contact with men who would show him a book “as was amarvel to hear of.” The men were two merchants, George Elyotand George Robinson, who presumably had access to a copy ofFish’s book smuggled into England from abroad, or who may evenhave smuggled it in themselves. The king had the book read outto him, made a long pause, and remarked, “If a man should pulldown an old stone wall, and begin at the lower part, the upper partthereof might chance to fall upon his head.”50 The meaning of thisgnomic comment evidently is that Henry grasped that belief inPurgatory was so foundational that, if the risks of institutionalchaos were to be avoided, many other aspects of Catholic dogmawould have to be dismantled first, or perhaps that he foresaw thathe would have to establish the principle of royal supremacy beforehe could safely meddle with the wealth of the monks and friars.The king in this account put the book away in his desk and toldthe merchants to keep their interview with him a secret.


In the other account, it was sent—Foxe does not say by whom—to the king’s intimate friend Anne Boleyn, whose personal positionand family fortunes depended on the fate of the Reformation; shethen brought it to the king. After Henry “kept the book in hisbosom” three or four days, the story goes, he contacted Fish’s wifeand, promising a safe conduct, told her he wished to see her hus-band. Trusting one of Henry’s promises was probably the rashestthing Fish ever did, but his book’s suggestion that the crown seizemonastic wealth had obviously delighted the king, who “embracedhim with loving countenance,” talked with him for three or fourhours, and even took him hunting. For once the king was as goodas his word, giving Fish his signet ring as a token of his protectionand instructing his lord chancellor, Sir Thomas More, not to touchthe fugitive. The king, however, had neglected to say anythingabout Fish’s wife, whom More promptly moved to interrogate.51

Brilliant, learned, politically adroit, and passionately committedto the Catholic Church, More was deeply anxious about the spreadof poisonous heresies and determined to stop it. He had knownabout Fish and his dangerous book for some time. Only a fewmonths after A Supplication for the Beggars appeared, though busywith high affairs of state and on the brink of his elevation to thelord chancellorship, More wrote a substantial reply, divided intotwo long books, The Supplication of Souls. The length is characteris-tic of More’s polemical writings, most of them disastrously miscon-ceived as rhetorical performances, but it may also reflect a pecu-liarly personal stake.In Utopia (1516) More had slyly satirized the idleness of friars,and he had imagined radical measures to solve the problems ofpoverty, homelessness, and hunger in England. In Utopia, More’simaginary traveler pointedly observes, everyone works, none moreso than themembers of the religious orders, who “allow themselvesno leisure” but devote their full time to good works (boniis officiis).Lest the reader think that these are sacramental good works, suchas saying masses for the dead, More spells out in detail the tasksundertaken by the Utopian equivalent of monks and friars: “Sometend the sick. Others repair roads, clean out ditches, rebuildbridges, dig turf and sand and stone, fell and cut up trees, and


transport wood, grain, and other things into the cities in carts.”52

The consequence of this universal work ethic stands in startlingcontrast to the miseries so widespread at home: “In Utopia thereis no poor man and no beggar.”53

Years after writing these words, when he encountered Fish’s vi-sion of an England in which “idle people be set to work” and eventhe poorest wretches “have enough and more than shall sufficeus”(422), More must have glimpsed a crudely distorted reflectionof his own earlier self. This glimpse of a dangerous, heretical dou-ble would help to explain not only the sharp reduction of concernin The Supplication of Souls for the plight of the poor but also themelancholy absence of the deft irony, playful wit, and mirth thatMore cultivated throughout the darkest moments of his life, evenonto the scaffold where he lost his head. Confronted by Fish’s bois-terous, coarse voice, railing against the corrupt clergy and plead-ing on behalf of the dispossessed, the visionary author of the centu-ry’s greatest work of social criticism is transformed, apart from afew flashes of mordant comedy, into an anxiously defensive spokes-man for the Catholic clerical establishment.If in The Supplication of SoulsMore does not altogether repudiatehis earlier social criticism, his attempt to give the lie to each ofthe reformer’s claims forces him to turn in a strikingly differentdirection. Where Fish declares that the number of beggars has oflate greatly increased, More argues that if people remembered thepast rightly, they would “think and say that they have in days pastseen as many sick beggars as they see now.”54 Poor householders,to be sure, have in recent times “made right hard shift forcorn”(121), but “very few” are dying of hunger, and the source oftheir plight is certainly not the begging of the friars and otherclerics. The “beggars’ proctor” (that is, official agent or fund-raiser), as More dubs Fish, has got all his facts wrong in a recklessattempt to slander the church: the church does not in fact possessa third part of the lands of the realm; there are not 52,000 parishchurches in England; every household does not make a quarterlycontribution of one penny to each of the five mendicant orders;the friars do not receive annual donations totaling 43,333 pounds,6 shillings, and 8 pence, and so on. Fish’s solemn enumeration of


economic statistics is “mad,” More writes, or, rather, it is a pack oflies enabling the slanderer to bring in “his ragman’s roll of hisrude rhetoric against the poor friars” (125).The heretic’s lies, in More’s account, extend beyond his tenden-

tious assessment of England’s economic woes. A Supplication for theBeggers tries to persuade the king that the Catholic Church is aschool of sedition and rebellion, but The Supplication of Souls count-ers that the exact opposite is the case. In Germany, More observes,Luther’s heretical books sparked a peasant rising that quicklyspread from attacks upon the spirituality to murderous attacksupon princes and magistrates. In England heretics like Sir JohnOldcastle, espousing seditious views similar to those advanced bythe beggars’ proctor, provoked comparable disorders during thereign of Henry V. The author of A Supplication for the Beggers impu-dently lectures the king, implying that he is weak and incompetent;Catholic clerics, by contrast, understand that “there is nothingearthly that so much keepeth themselves in quiet rest and suretyas doth the due obedience of the people to the virtuous mind ofthe prince” (128).Churchmen, moreover, have no such power over laymen as the

heretic claims they do, in Parliament or in the nation’s courts, nor,More writes, do they routinely accuse their critics of heresy. Rich-ard Hunne, More writes, was already suspected of heresy beforehe brought a suit against the church, and he was not murderedby the bishop’s henchman: “the man hanged himself for despair,despight, and for lack of grace” (135). The beggars’ proctor mayclaim that “all the world knows” Hunne was murdered, but “wedare be bold to warrant you that in heaven, hell, and here amongus in Purgatory of all that this man so boldly affirmeth the contraryis well and clearly known” (134). As for the charge that the clergycorrupt the morals of the kingdom, and the proposal that theyshould be compelled to marry in order to generate legitimate off-spring, such notions, “so merry and so mad,” are enough “to makeone laugh that lieth in the fire” (153). But unfortunately the beg-gars’ proctor is not making a tasteless joke; he is in deadly earnest.“To make one laugh that lieth in the fire”: More’s cruel figure

of speech—cruel because the burning of heretics was an ongoing


reality that More himself was actively furthering at the time—is notmerely a playful hyperbole; it is a glimpse of the theatrical strategythat he adopts to counter the theatrical strategy of his hereticalenemy. If A Supplication for the Beggers speaks in the voice of thepoor, The Supplication of Souls speaks in the voice of the dead burn-ing in purgatorial fire.55 And, like Fish’s beggars, the dead, as Moreconceives them, have very few reasons to laugh. The reader en-counters a desperate appeal for help, comfort, and pity from “yourlate acquaintance, kindred, spouses, companions, playfellows, andfriends.” These former intimates are crying out not because theyare dead, not even because they are abiding the “grievous painsand hot cleansing fire” of Purgatory, but because they have become“humble and unacquainted and half-forgotten suppliants.” Theyhad once been able to count on relief and comfort from the privateprayers of virtuous people and, still more, from “the daily Massesand other ghostly suffrages of priests, religious, and folk of HolyChurch” (111).More’s own father, it is worth noting, had in his last will andtestament arranged, at considerable expense, for these suffrages,not only for himself but also for his three wives, the former hus-bands of his second and third wives, his parents, and other nameddead people, including King Edward IV, as well as “all Christiansouls.”56 Now those who had made comparably careful arrange-ments for the alleviation of their agonies fear that this consolationand help will vanish, for “certain seditious persons” (111) havespread pestilent doubts about the very existence of Purgatory andthe efficacy of the Holy Church’s good works on behalf of the dead.

THE CLAIMS OF KINSHIP

The Supplication of Souls, then, begins with the dead crying out, likethe ghost of Gy, begging for suffrages. The suffering souls knowthat their loud lamentings will be disturbing to the living, who de-sire understandably to take their ease, and who have buried thedead precisely so that the dead will remain buried. But the deadnow have no choice, for they fear that they are being forgotten.Though they have been good souls who have “long lain and cried


so far from you that we seldom broke your sleep” (111–12), theymust now make their existence and their agonies known.57 Theydo so in order to counteract the pernicious influence of A Supplica-tion for the Beggars, an influence that threatens not only the soulsof the dead but also the souls of the living.Indeed, after initially speaking for their own plight, the dead in

More’s book affirm that they, after all, are not the real victims ofthe anonymous author’s venom, for when their purgatorial pun-ishment has ceased, they will be “translated” to heavenly bliss. It isthe living who run the real risk, for they will find, “for lack of beliefof Purgatory, the very straight way to hell” (113). To lure unsus-pecting readers down this path is indeed the whole purpose ofthe wicked anonymous author, whose identity, More’s dead soulsdeclare, is not unknown to them, both because certain of his associ-ates before their deaths repented their heresies, returned to thetrue faith, and are now companions in Purgatory, and because “ourand your ghostly enemy the devil” has visited Purgatory in personto brag about his agent on earth.58 With his “enmious [hostile] andenvious laughter gnashing the teeth and grinning” (114), the devildelights in the virulent power of the book that will deceive manysimple readers.In order to combat this satanic adversary, Book 2 of The Supplica-

tion of Souls launches into an extended defense of the doctrine ofPurgatory, an odd enterprise, perhaps, for souls who profess to besuffering from its tormenting fires, but one presumably justifiedboth by their concern for misguided mortals and by their fear ofbeing forgotten. Though reason alone, they claim, would lead in-evitably to the idea of a process of purgation after death, much ofthis defense consists of rather strained interpretation of key bibli-cal citations, especially verses from the Second Book of the Macca-bees and from Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians.59 In 2Macca-bees, Judas Maccabeus orders prayers on behalf of certain sinfulJewish soldiers who had been killed:

All men therefore praising the Lord, the righteous judge, whohad opened the things that were hid, betook themselves untoprayer, and besought him that the sin committedmight wholly


be put out of remembrance. Besides, that noble Judas ex-horted the people to keep themselves from sin, forsomuch asthey saw before their eyes the things that came to pass for sinsof those that were slain.

Not only does this passage clearly show prayers for the dead—apractice that the ancient Hebrews were often claimed not to fol-low—but it goes on to depict a monetary “sin offering” that thechurch claimed strikingly anticipated indulgences:

And when he had made a gathering throughout the companyto the sum of two thousand drachmas of silver, he sent it toJerusalem to offer a sin offering, doing therein very well andhonestly, in that he was mindful of the resurrection; For if hehad not hoped that they that were slain should have risenagain, it had been superfluous and vain to pray for the dead.And also in that he perceived that there was great favour laidup for those that died godly, it was an holy and good thought.Whereupon he made a reconciliation for the dead, that theymight be delivered from sin. (2 Macc. 12:41–46)

In the passage from 1 Corinthians, Paul writes that “other foun-dation can no man lay than that is laid which is Jesus Christ.” Hethen expands upon this image:

Now if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, pre-cious stones, wood, hay, stubble; Every man’s work shall bemade manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall berevealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work of whatsort it is. If any man’s work shall be burned, he shall sufferloss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire. (1 Cor.3:11–15)

The problem, as More understood quite well, is that none ofthe scriptural passages—and the difficult, enigmatic ones I havequoted are by far the most relevant—comes very close to the Cath-olic Church’s doctrine of Purgatory.60 To be sure, 2 Maccabeesspeaks reasonably plainly about prayers for the dead (though notabout a place called Purgatory), but none of the Maccabean books


were a part of the Hebrew canon, and many Christians, includingthe Reformers, relegated them to the Apocrypha. Paul’s First Epis-tle to the Corinthians was certainly canonical, but it said nothingabout prayers for the dead, and its words of warning—about a firethat would test the worth of each man’s work, whether built ofgold, silver, and fine stone, or of wood, hay, and stubble—do notin any obvious way refer to Purgatory or assert the existence of realas distinct from metaphorical fire.From time to time, when the strain of attempting to prove the

existence of Purgatory by natural reason or scriptural interpreta-tion becomes too great, More’s souls appeal to the witness of “theold holy doctors” (194) and to the dogmatic authority of the HolyChurch. Heretics claim that the Book of Maccabees is apocryphal,but “since the Church of Christ accounteth it for Holy Scripture,there can noman doubt thereof,” for everyone who affirms himselfto be a Christian, from “the noble doctor and glorious confessor”Saint Augustine to the archheretic Luther, must necessarily believethat “the church cannot fail surely and certainly to discern betweenthe words of God and the words of men” (182). Without such anabsolute assurance, “then stood all Christendom in doubt and un-surety whether St. John’s Gospel were Holy Scripture or not, andso forth of all the New Testament” (183). Of course, as More con-cedes, including the Second Book of Maccabees in the canon willnot settle the issue once and for all, since even that book doesnot mention Purgatory, but there are other ancient tenets of theChristian faith, such as the Virgin Birth, that are not “plain proved”by Holy Scripture and yet cannot and must not be doubted. Onefact alone should be enough “to stop the mouths of all the proud,high-hearted, malicious heretics”: “The Catholic Church of Christhath always believed Purgatory”(195).It was precisely this flat claim, as More himself knew, that the

heretics challenged, just as they challenged his scriptural readings.On a few occasions in the long treatise, More’s souls reach beyondtextual arguments and dogmatic pronouncements to appeal to theexperience of the living. Nothing can enable you to “conceive avery right imagination of these things which ye never felt,” theyconcede, but you may be able to grasp the nature of purgatorial


suffering if you consider a ship wallowing about in high seas. Asmall number of passengers are so well “attempered of themselves”that they feel “as lusty and as jocund” as if they were on land. Oth-ers are anything but jocund: “But then shall ye sometimes see theresome other whose body is so incurably corrupted that they shallwalter and totter and wring their hands and gnash the teeth, andtheir eyes water, their head ache, their body fret, their stomachwamble, and all their body shiver for pain, and yet shall nevervomit at all: or if they vomit, yet shall they vomit still and neverfind ease thereof” (189). If the former figure the saved in Heavenand the latter the damned in Hell, how shall we imagine the soulsin Purgatory? They are the passengers who feel horrible at firstand yet who are, after a vomit or two, “so clean rid of their griefthat they never feel displeasure of it after.” Such is themiddle state,the betwixt-and-between condition of More’s speakers.But the problem remains of convincing readers, poisoned by A

Supplication for the Beggers, that Purgatory actually exists, for dog-matic appeals to the authority of the church, strained textual inter-pretation, and metaphors masquerading as realities are preciselywhat Fish’s book attacked as mainstays of Roman Catholic hypoc-risy. As a last resort, the souls in More’s text can point to thetestimony of ghosts. “For there hath in every country and everyage apparitions been had,” they say, “and well-known and testifiedby which men have had sufficient revelation and proof of Purga-tory, except such as list not to believe them; and they be such aswould be never better if they saw them” (196). To be sure, it wouldbe impious to demand to see such apparitions for oneself; theyare rare precisely so that people can believe by faith. Those stub-born enough to reject the well-authenticated stories of such appari-tions and to demand further proof deserve the punishmentthey will undoubtedly receive after death when they will “to theirpain see such a grisly sight as shall so grieve their hearts to lookthereon” (197).More knew that it was possible to be skeptical about ghost sto-ries. In the colloquy “Exorcism, or the Specter” (1524), his friendErasmus tells the tale of a gullible priest who is tricked into be-lieving that he has encountered a ghost, a gullibility More himself


mocks in similar terms in the dedication to his translation (1506)of Lucian’s Philopseudes. But in his translation of a life of Pico dellaMirandola, More renders apparently straightforwardly Savonaro-la’s report that “Picus had after his death appeared unto him, allcompassed in fire: and showed unto him, that he was such wise inPurgatory punished for his negligence, and his unkindness.”61 Thesermons and homiletical literature with which More and most ofhis contemporaries were well acquainted are filled with stories ofthis kind, many deriving from voluminous collections of exemplasuch as the Dialogus miraculorum (Dialogue on Miracles) compiledbetween 1219 and 1223 by Caesarius of Heisterbach or the ScalaCoeli compiled by none other than Jean Gobi.62 Hence, for exam-ple, Gobi recounts that before his death a powerful abbot demandsthat the monks elect his young nephew to succeed him. One daythe newly elected abbot is walking in a garden past a beautifulfountain from the midst of whose waters he is startled to hear terri-ble cries and groans. When he demands, in the name of Christ’sPassion, who is making these noises, a voice replies, “I am the soulof your uncle boiling in these waters in excruciating pain for hav-ing demanded that you succeed to my diginities.” Astonished bythese words, the nephew declares that it is scarcely believable thatanyone could be burning in such cold water, to which the spectralvoice responds by ordering him to cast into the fountain a coppercandlestick. When the candlestick immediately melts, the youngman at once resigns his position, whereupon the groans from thefountain cease.63

The rhetorical problem, from More’s point of view, must havebeen that most of these stories are too obviously homiletical. Theyprovide a lively way of castigating particular sins, often with thesatirical edge that we encountered in The Gast of Gy, but they carryabout them the slightly stale air of the pulpit. Thus, in one typicalMiddle English sermon, a group of boys are singing psalms overthe body of a priest. When the children reach the verse “Thoushalt keep thy tongue from all falsehood,” the dead body suddenlyarises and says, “Forsooth, ye say sooth. And forasmuch as I havenot done so, but slandered my even-Christian [fellow Christians]and harmed them with my tongue, therefore I am in woe enough.


See now how that I am tormented in that member.” Predictablyenough, he then opens his mouth and shows the boys that histongue is on fire. Once the point is made, the lesson is over: “Andwhen the body had said thus, he laid him down again and did nomore harm.”64

Such neatly illustrative ghosts make, as More understood, nomore powerful a claim upon the living than do the names ofstrangers inscribed on tombstones and effigies. Such names areinstances of what Jean-Claude Schmitt calls “cold memory.”65 Morewas interested in warm memory or, rather, to shift the metaphorto the one Shakespeare uses in Hamlet, “green” memory. After amonth or two, when memory ceased to be green, ghosts were lessand less likely to appear, or, if they did appear, less and less likelyto seem anything but an instructive fantasy. More’s souls do notspeak about sin; they speak about connectedness: “Rememberwhat kin ye and we be together,” they cry to the living, “what famil-iar friendship hath ere this been between us: what sweet words yehave spoken and what promise ye have made us. Let now yourwords appear and your fair promise be kept” (228).This appeal, of course, would work best on those who had re-

cently lost loved ones, andMore knows that he cannot assume suchfresh losses for most of his readers. Therefore the spirits in TheSupplication of Souls acknowledge the anomalousness of what mustbe for many a belated and unwelcome return. Its untimeliness,they say, was due to the unprecedented and disastrous interruptionof suffrages caused by Fish’s malign pamphlet. More’s souls thenproceed to do what ghosts ordinarily did when they appeared toliving relatives, friends, and members of religious communities:first they give an account of their particular situation in the after-life and provide a description more generally of the nature of Pur-gatory, and then they appeal for particular actions to be performedon their behalf. More’s text does not end, however, with the prom-ise that often accompanied the appeal for suffrages, the souls’promise to return and report on the effect that these suffrageshave had. Perhaps More recognized that readers were unlikely toprofit from a second long ghostly discourse, or perhaps he did notknow whether his work would, as he fervently hoped, actually shore


up the old faith in Purgatory and thereby liberate his imaginedsouls from their agonies. His ghosts close instead with a promiseof reciprocity: if the living help the souls of the dead, in Purgatory,to reach bliss in Heaven, then the dead, in Heaven, “shall set handto help you thither to us” (228).The communal commitment to caring and assistance that con-

joins the living and the dead runs in both directions: after all, aswe have seen, the ghost of Gy returns not only to beg suffrages butalso to offer counsel to his wife. “The body of charity that links themembers of the Church,” writes Thomas Aquinas, “is valuable notonly to the living but also to the dead who have died in a state oflove [caritas]. . . . The dead live on in the memory of the living, . . .and so the suffrages of the living can be useful to the dead.”66 Thedead in turn, as Le Goff summarizes the position of the DominicanStephen of Bourbon and others, can be useful to the living: “[I]tis advantageous to pray for souls in Purgatory, because, once theyreach Paradise, they will pray for those who have helped themout.”67 Such a mutual exchange is what More’s souls propose: theywill benefit from the suffrages provided by the living, in return forwhich they will reward the living with their prayers. These prayerswill of necessity be efficacious, for the dead in Purgatory are al-ready assured of God’s special favor: “[W]e stand sure of his grace”(227). Not only are the living helping their loved ones; they arealso helping themselves.The centuries-old model here, which More would have under-

stood from firsthand experience at the court of Henry VIII, is giftgiving by those who sought to acquire influential friends, friendswho have the ear of the all-powerful ruler. But these are betterthan friends; they are kinsfolk whose integrity is guaranteed—afterall, these are the souls of the saved—and whose gratitude towardthose who have helped them is reinforced by the terrible intensityof their suffering. Together the living and the dead form a perfectcommunity of mutual charity and interest.In More’s view Fish and other heretics were bent on destroying

this precious sense of community; all that would be left would beignorant selfishness and greed, a world in which each generationwould be cut off from the last. To prevent this disaster, More des-


perately reminded his readers of the powerful claims upon themnot only of the Catholic Church but also of their own personalghosts. Simon Fish does not himself specifically challenge the exis-tence of ghosts, but English Protestants were beginning to do so.“Let no man . . . be moved by those deceitful spirits,” writes MilesCoverdale, “which, as they say, do appear unto men, and desiretheir help, praying that masses, pilgrimages, and other like super-stitious ceremonies, may be done for them; for even the samenight-bogs, like as they in old time were among the heath, so arethey now also among the Turks. Neither is it a wonder, if the devilcan disguise himself in the form of a dead man, seeing he cantransfigure himself into an angel of light.”68 In a work that datesfrom the late 1540s, A Confutation of Unwritten Verities, ArchbishopCranmer (or someone in his entourage) assembled a set of scrip-tural and patristic passages to show that “apparitions of the deadbe unsufficient to prove truth.” Many men dream that they see thedead, writes the Greek Church Father Chrysostom in one of thesepassages, but such apparitions are not to be credited. If a man seesa ghost, as Cranmer’s text notes in a marginal gloss, he may becertain that “it is not the soul of the dead that saith, I am such aman’s soul, but the devil counterfeiteth the dead to deceive theliving: for souls departed the body cannot walk here on earth.”There is no point in trying to distinguish between real ghosts anddemons disguised as ghosts; there is no exit, no route back fromthe place where the dead are locked away. In order tomake it moredifficult for the devil to introduce deceits and frauds, “God hathshut up that way, neither doth he suffer any of the dead to comeagain hither.”69

In The Supplication of Souls, More is aware of the problem, which,as we saw, was discussed in The Gast of Gy: how could apparitionsleave the prison house of Purgatory at all in order to appear onearth, if they are meant to be burning in fires? The souls explainthat “we carry our pain with us” (221);70 indeed, their pain is inten-sified by their witnessing the ongoing life of the living. The guard-ian devils (“our evil angels”) whom God commands to accompanythe souls back to the earth compel some of their miserable prison-ers to watch their own funerals, forcing them to stand invisible in


the midst of the crowd of mourners and “to look on our carrioncorpse carried out with great pomp” (220). Other souls are forcedto look at the gold they have left behind and to contemplate “ourlate wives so soon waxen wanton and, forgetting us their old hus-bands that have loved them so tenderly and left them so rich, sitand laugh and make merry and more too sometimes with theirnew wooers, while our keepers in despight keep us there in painto stand still and look on”(222).More characteristically does not imagine dead wives looking

on at their husbands’ carousals, but only dead husbands return-ing, like the ghost of Gy, to see their wives. Indeed, More’s misera-ble ghosts are forced to witness the pleasures, including sexualpleasures, of their widows. This scene, more than any other heinvokes in his long work, seems to conjure up a passionate spectraloutburst:

Many times would we then speak, if we could be suffered, andsore we long to say to her, “Ah wife, wife, ywisse this was notcovenant, wife, when ye wept and told me that if I left you tolive by, ye would never wed again. We see there our childrentoo, whom we loved so well, pipe, sing, and dance, and nomore think on their fathers’ souls then on their old shoes,saving that sometimes commeth out “God have mercy on allChristian souls.” But it commeth out so coldly and with so dullaffection that it lieth but in the lips and never came near theheart. (222)71

Vows are broken, mourning is forgotten, life resumes its round ofheedless pleasures, and even piety takes the form of cold lip ser-vice. The dead in their individuality, their intense suffering, theirurgent claims on personal remembrance, are consigned to obliv-ion or become at best an anonymous, generalized category, the “allChristian souls” casually invoked in a ritual phrase by thoughtlesschildren.Against this terrible indifference the suffering souls in More’s

text cry out, passionately claiming the right to be remembered andthe rites of memory. They claim something more tangible as well:the alms that will relieve them of some of their pains. Seeing them-


selves forgotten by their wives, their children, and their friends,the dead are consumed with regret that they left so much behindthem and “had not sent hither more of our substance before us byour own hands” (222). Looking around them, they see that thosewho had arranged during their own lifetimes to give away theirwealth to the church in anticipation of their postmortem suffer-ings are in far better condition than those who are now countingon the goodwill of their heirs and executors. That goodwill hasalways been threatened by the ordinary power of greed: “[C]atchevery man what he can and hold fast that he catcheth and carenothing for us” (222). But it has of late been disastrously erodedby the malicious mockery of heretics who “make a game and a jestnow of our heavy pains” (226).The ghosts return again and again to their terrible problem:they are screaming in pain and pleading for help, but their ene-mies say not only that they are not suffering but that they do notexist at all. How can they make their existence manifest? How canthey enable the living to imagine and to credit fully what they areenduring? “If ever ye lay sick and thought the night long andlonged sore for day while every hour seemed longer than five,”they cry out in a passage that anticipates Donne’s sickbed Devotions,“bethink you then what a long night we silly [helpless] souls endurethat lie sleepless, restless, burning, and broiling in the dark fireone long night of many days, of many weeks, and some of manyyears together” (225).But even as they elaborate on this similitude—“You walter perad-venture and tolter in sickness from side to side and find little restin any part of the bed: we lie bounded to the brands and cannotlift up our heads,” etc.—they seem to hear the derision of theirenemies, who “laugh at our lamentation because we speak of ourheads, our hands, our feet, and such our other gross bodily mem-bers as lie buried in our graves and of our garments that we didwear which come not hither with us.” What can they do? How elsecan they make any person on earth conceive “in his imaginationand fantasy” what “we bodiless souls do suffer”? Without using thelanguage of the body, it would be impossible, “muchmore impossi-ble than to make a born blind man to perceive in his mind the


nature and difference of colors” (226). Only if the living conceiveof their dead in the familiar terms of the body will they be able toremember their loved ones and do what they can to help them.“Our wives there,” More’s dead cry out from the otherworld, “re-member here your husbands. Our children there remember hereyour parents. Our parents there remember here your children.Our husbands there remember here your wives” (223–24).Here More imagines dead wives speaking out, not to lament

their surviving husbands’ pleasures but to regret their own pastdelight in gorgeous clothing, jewels, and cosmetics. This “gay gear”is now burning hot upon their tormented bodies, so that, lookingback on their lives, they wish that their husbands “never had fol-lowed our fantasies, nor never had so cockered us nor made us sowanton, nor had given us other ouches [brooches] than onions orgreat garlic heads” (224). For them, of course, such thoughts cometoo late, but they have a generous desire to save others as well asto help themselves. “We beseech you,” they cry out from beyondthe grave to their living husbands, “since ye gave them us, let ushave them still. Let them hurt none other woman but help to dous good: sell them for our sakes to set in saints’ copes, and sendthe money hither by mass pennies and by poor men that may prayfor our souls” (224).How can you show that you remember the dead, that you carefor your departed wives and husbands and children, that you arenot cruelly indifferent to their sufferings? Give money to thechurch for the recitation of prayers. Since masses for the deadwere closely linked to almsgiving, it would in principle have beenpossible for More to reject Fish’s premise entirely and to claim thatthe doctrine of Purgatory was in fact a strong incentive to charity,but instead he chooses to set the dead against the living.72 More’spoor souls understand themselves to be in direct competition withFish’s beggars:

If ye pity the poor, there is none so poor as we that have nota brat [rag] to put on our backs. If ye pity the blind, there isnone so blind as we which are here in the dark, saving forsights unpleasant and loathsome, till some comfort come. If


ye pity the lame, there is none so lame as we that neither cancreep one foot out of the fire, nor have one hand at liberty todefend our face from the flame. Finally, if ye pity any man inpain, never knew ye pain comparable to ours, whose fire asfar passeth in heat all the fires that ever burned upon earthas the hottest of all those passeth a fained fire painted on awall. (225)73

More was a savvy politician who must have grasped perfectly wellthat it would be rhetorically wiser to point out that the church didcare for the hungry and the sick, often in the same moment inwhich it was caring for the dead, but he accepts Fish’s challenge.Why? It is possible that he simply blundered, drawn into a trap byhis overwhelming sympathy for the suffering souls. But perhaps,too, his rhetorical position was hardened by the fact that he couldnot use the one overwhelmingly obvious argument against Fish:namely, that Henry VIII was probably the least likely person in En-gland to redistribute the wealth of the church to the poor. Instead,More argues that the miseries of the poor are vastly exceeded bythe unspeakable miseries of souls in Purgatory, and the good thatalms can do for the living is vastly exceeded by what the same almscan do for the dead. Moreover, the money that is donated for therelief of souls is proof that the giver is not a heretic who dismissesthe flames of Purgatory as mere “fained fire” and “taketh in hisheart that story told by God for a very fantastic fable” (227). Conse-quently, the souls declare, as if their supplication were an invest-ment prospectus, whatever you give “shall also rebound upon your-self an inestimable profit” (227).Fish’s ally, the young reformer John Frith, took special note of

this particular passage. As we saw in chapter 2, Frith was one ofthose who charged that Purgatory was a tangle of dreams and fan-tasies. But, quoting the impassioned appeal for pity in The Supplica-tion of Souls, he wryly conceded at least part of More’s argument:“Verily, among all his other poetry it is reason that we grant himthis; yea, and that our fire is but water in comparison to it, for, Iensure you, it hath alone melted more gold and silver, for ourspirituality’s profit, out of poor men’s purses, than all the gold-


smiths’ fires within England, neither yet therewith can the ragingheat be assuaged, but it melteth castles, hard stones, lands andtenements innumerable.”74 Therefore, Frith concedes with ruefulirony, we must grant that “this fire is very hot.”But, though The Supplication of Souls reiterates the appeal for

money, it would be a mistake to conclude with Frith that its princi-pal aim was to augment the church’s revenues. More’s concern isto counteract a serious and potentially damaging attack upon thechurch, an attack launched against what the scholarly humanistMore knew perfectly well was one of its most vulnerable doctrines.Simon Fish spoke in the name of the poor and dispossessed, buthe does not seem a tenderhearted philanthropist, and it is unlikelythat his concern lay with their plight.75 His book takes the form ofa petition to the king, to whom it offers in effect a convenient,morally upright political cover for a cynical course of action Henryhad probably already been contemplating, just as Henry was loudlyprofessing that it was his moral scruples that impelled him to seek adivorce from Catharine of Aragon. Fish’s own motives were almostcertainly not mercenary; rather he was offering the king and thenation a kind of bait to embark on a path that would lead to areformed religion.More understood the bait and struggled to avert the danger by

recalling his readers to their deep and ancient religious loyalty.Money is important, to be sure, as both Fish and More agree, butfor More it is a sign of remembrance. “Let never any slothful obliv-ion raze us out of your remembrance,” the souls cry; “Rememberwhat kin ye and we be together”; “remember how nature and Chris-tendom bindeth you to remember us”; “remember our thirst whileye sit and drink; our hunger while ye be feasting; our restless watchwhile ye be sleeping; our sore and grievous pain while ye be play-ing; our hot, burning fire while ye be in pleasure and sporting. Somight God make your offspring after remember you” (227–28).

) 4 (

STAGING GHOSTS

THE GHOSTS who cry out desperately in the pages of More’s Suppli-cation, for fear that they are being forgotten, the ghosts who areconsigned to oblivion by skeptics and reassigned to Hell in thewritings of the triumphant Protestants, the ghosts who are increas-ingly labeled as fictions of the mind—these do not altogether van-ish in the later sixteenth century. Instead they turn up onstage.Not only onstage, of course: reports of hauntings occur from

time to time throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,as they continue to do in the present. In the late 1570s, for exam-ple, Henry Caesar, the vicar of Lostwithiel in Cornwall, affirms thata conjuror had brought back the deceased Cardinal Pole at therequest of Sir Walter Mildmay.1 So, too, ghosts perennially appearin ballads: “My mouth it is full cold, Margaret,” laments the ghostof Clerk Sanders in one of these ballads; “It has the smell now ofthe ground.”2 But there is always something suspect about suchapparitions: they are specimens of “folk beliefs,” to be savored ordespised, or evidence of fraud, or signs of residual Catholic “super-stition.” Henry Caesar was long suspected of being a papist sympa-thizer: in church he wore a cope and turned his face away fromthe congregation when he read the divine service.3 Popular bal-lads, too, were hiding-holes for old believers. A broadside of 1616tells of three ghosts that arise from their graves to announce theimminence of doomsday. One ghost, “most seemly clear andwhite,” praises the Lord; another, “gnashing of his teeth together,”hideously cries, “Woe, woe unto you, wicked men!” But the middle

152 C H A P T ER F O U R

ghost, “all in fire,” calls for repentance. Either an unexamined tra-dition has brought with it this third, manifestly purgatorial ghost,like wreckage carried downstream from an ancient ruin, or theballad-monger has deliberately preserved a figure from the ban-ished system of faith.4 What is gone, in any case, is legitimate, sanc-tioned belief in ghosts, the ghosts featured in stories told from thepulpit by friars and priests who had culled them from the greatcollections of exempla.The major exception in Elizabethan and Jacobean public space

is the theater, where ghosts make frequent appearances.5 As earlyas 1559, in a translation of Seneca’s Troas Jasper Heywood adds along, grim speech by the “spright” of Achilles:

Now mischief, murder, wrath of hell draweth near,And dire Phlegethon flood doth blood require:Achilles’ death shall be revenged here.6

Such menacing tirades, adapted from a Senecan drama abundantin vengeful ghosts, become a regular feature of late-sixteenth-century English drama. The ghost of Gorlois, surging up from“Pluto’s pits and glooming shades,” chilled the spectators of TheMisfortunes of Arthur by Thomas Hughes and other law students ofGray’s Inn:

Come therefore blooms of settled mischief’s root,Come each thing else, what fury can invent,Wreak all at once, infect the air with plagues,Till bad to worse, till worse to worst be turned.Let mischiefs know no mean, nor plagues an end.7

At about the same time, the late 1580s, in Locrine (probably byThomas Peele), the ghost of Albanact appeared to the man whohad killed him in battle—“For now revenge shall ease my lingeringgrief, / And now revenge shall glut my longing soul”8—while inThomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy the ghost of the slain Andrea sat downin the company of Revenge to watch the whole ghastly bloodletting.There are occasional comic ghosts—Will Summer in Thomas

Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and Testament, for example, or the spiritof Jack in Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale, who returns to aid the stranger

153STA G I N G G H O ST S

who generously paid for his Christian burial—but the predomi-nant theatrical figures of the dead are spirits from the underworldwho, like the ghost of Thyestes in Seneca’s Agamemnon, long to seethe stage run with blood. “Antonio, revenge,” cries the ghost ofthe murdered Andrugio to his son, in John Marston’s Antonio’sRevenge (1601),

I was empoisoned by Piero’s hand;Revenge my blood. Take spirit gentle boy.Revenge my blood.9

Only a spectacular act of vengeance—on the night that the mur-derer was going to marry Andrugio’s widow, in the midst of thefestivities, the villainous Piero is taken by surprise, tortured, andstabbed to death—can appease the rage in the murdered man’sspirit. An eager spectator of the killing, the ghost declares himselfsatisfied and proud of his dutiful son:

’Tis done, and now my soul shall sleep in rest.Sons that revenge their father’s blood are blest.

(5.3.114–15)

Such figures may have helped to fuel contemporary complaintsthat the theater was unchristian, but they did not seem to arousea specifically theological anxiety.10 No one, even among the mostrabid Puritan antitheatricalists, could imagine them to be secretagents for the pope’s Purgatory. Their ancestry is manifestly classi-cal rather than Catholic: they derive not only from Seneca but alsofrom Aeschylus (who presents the ghost of Darius in the Persae andof Clytemnestra in the Eumenides) and Euripides (who presents themurdered Polydorus in theHecuba). Hence the attacks upon them,when they come, are more literary than doctrinal. The anonymousA Warning for Fair Women (ca. 1599) begins with a debate amongTragedy, Comedy, and History. Tragedy scolds History for beingnoisy, all drums and shouting, and Comedy for being slight andchildish. Comedy responds bymocking Tragedy’s penchant for thestory of some “damned tyrant” who stabs, hangs, poisons, smoth-ers, or cuts throats to obtain the crown. “Then, too, a filthy whiningghost,” the mockery continues,


Lapped in some foul sheet or a leather pilch,Comes screaming like a pig half-sticked,And cries, “Vindicta! Revenge, Revenge!”With that a little rosin flasheth forth,Like smoke out of a tobacco pipe or a boy’s squib.11

Comedy is interested in showing how Tragedy’s spookiest effectis produced, and still more interested in showing that the effect ischeap.

MARLOWE’S SUCCUBUS

In keeping with this disdain, two of the greatest playwrights of theage, Marlowe and Jonson, show surprisingly little interest in thepopular stage figure of the ghost. Jonson’s fundamentally comicand satiric sensibility is almost completely averse to it, as is mani-festly demonstrated by his abortive attempt to introduce one at thebeginning of his wooden tragedy Catiline, and by the contempt hevoices in Poetaster.12 Marlowe’s sensibility was less obviously antipa-thetic. But though there would have been ample scope for spectac-ular hauntings in the two parts of Tamburlaine, The Jew of Malta,Edward II, and, above all, Dido, Queen of Carthage, he eschews allrepresentation of ghosts in these plays. To be sure, the villainousJew Barabas, impatiently waiting at midnight under the walls of hisexpropriated house, thinks of himself as one of the specters who,according to a popular belief that Horatio also recalls in Hamlet,keep watch over buried treasure:

Now I remember those old women’s words,Who in my wealth would tell me winter’s tales,And speak of spirits and ghosts that glide by nightAbout the place where Treasure hath been hid.And now methinks that I am one of those,For whilst I live here lives my soul’s sole hope,And when I die here shall my spirit walk.13

But a moment later, after his daughter Abigail has thrown him thebags of gold and jewels that he has hidden under the floor-


boards—“Father, here receive thy happiness”—all talk of ghostsvanishes in an effusion of satisfied greed: “O girl, O gold, O beauty,O my bliss!” (2.1.54).The exception in Marlowe is Doctor Faustus, where, along with

grapes out of season, devils with fireworks, and horses that turninto straw, the magician conjures up what seem to be the spirits ofthe dead. “Then, Faustus, as thou late didst promise us,” declaresthe German emperor, Charles the Fifth,

We would behold that famous conquerorGreat Alexander and his paramourIn their true shapes and state majestical,That we may wonder at their excellence.14

Sending Mephostophilis to do his bidding, Faustus sets conditionsfor watching the spectacle. This will not be an interview, he makesclear, like Saul’s anxious interrogation of the spirit of Samuel orJean Gobi’s demanding theological clarification from the ghost ofGy. Rather, it will be a spectacle, like a masque or play:

My lord, I must forewarn your majestyThat when my spirits present the royal shapesOf Alexander and his paramour,Your grace demand no questions of the king,But in dumb silence let them come and go.

(4.1.92–96)

“When my spirits present the royal shapes”: the spirits underFaustus’s command will take on the forms of Alexander and hisparamour, miming them with uncanny verisimilitude. Marlowe’sprincipal source, The History of the Damnable Life, and Deserved Deathof Doctor John Faustus (1592), makes the point explicit, adding adetail that explains why the likeness is so accurate: “I am ready toaccomplish your request in all things, so far forth as I and my spiritare able to perform,” Faustus tells the emperor; “Yet your majestyshall know that their dead bodies are not able substantially to bebrought before you, but such spirits as have seen Alexander andhis paramour alive shall appear unto you in manner and form asthey both lived in their most flourishing time.”15 These will not be


the shades of the ancient conqueror and his mistress—their bodiessomehow reanimated or their souls reclothed in flesh—but rathercunning and persuasive representations, fashioned by actors whohave directly observed those whom they are presenting. The repre-sentations will not have actual bodies: when the emperor, ravishedby the sight, goes to embrace them, Faustus has to remind himthat “these are but shadows, not substantial” (4.1.103). They aremasterfully detailed illusions, down to the “little wart or mole” onthe neck of the fair lady, but they are not human beings, eitherliving or dead.What are they, then? They are not specifically identified as any-

thing other than “spirits,” but there is at least a strong suggestionthat they are demons, at once infinitely alluring and destructive.“To glut the longing” of his heart’s desire, the doomed magician,eager to distract himself from tormenting thoughts of repentance,asks that the Helen whom he has recently conjured up be his par-amour. In the play’s most famous scene, he gets his wish, and hiswords mark his own decisive violation of the injunction to be silent:

Was this the face that launched a thousand shipsAnd burnt the topless towers of Ilium?Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.Her lips suck forth my soul. See where it flies!

(5.1.93–96)

Somewhere behind this celebrated moment of suicidal ecstasythere may be traces of the tangled tradition of spectral returnsthat we have been examining, but these traces have become sofaint as to be all but invisible. This is no ghost come from Purga-tory or even a spirit from classical Hades; this is something else: asuccubus.

SHAKESPEARE’S SPIRITS

Of the leading Renaissance English playwrights, it is only Shake-speare who fully participates in the popular vogue for presentingghosts onstage.16 Indeed, “participates” is an inadequate term:Shakespeare’s celebrated ghost scenes—easily the greatest in all of


English drama—are signs of a deep interest that continuesthrough virtually his entire career. He saw that he could draw upona range of traditions, including not only the classical Hades andthe popular Hell but also the banished realm of Catholic Purga-tory. He saw, too, that uncertainty—including perhaps his own un-certainty—about the very possibility of ghosts was itself valuabletheatrical capital. More than anyone of his age, Shakespearegrasped that there were powerful links between his art and thehaunting of spirits.The richest andmost complex exploitation of the theatrical cap-

ital Shakespeare found in ghosts is in Hamlet, which is the subjectof the next chapter and the subtext of this entire book, but it isimportant to grasp how frequently and insistently the figure of theghost recurs throughout his plays. The questions the figure raises,at once theological, psychological, and theatrical, are ones towhich Shakespeare never provides definitive answers; rather, heprefers to keep the issues alive by staging ghosts in a variety ofguises and from shifting perspectives.17 Each of these stagings hasits own distinct and subtle meanings, but there are three funda-mental perspectives to which Shakespeare repeatedly returns: theghost as a figure of false surmise, the ghost as a figure of history’snightmare, and the ghost as a figure of deep psychic disturbance.Half-hidden in all of these is a fourth perspective: the ghost as afigure of theater.Shakespeare was clearly fascinated by what we might call evacu-

ated ghost beliefs, beliefs attributable to panic, superstitious dread,or psychological projection. This fascination may have seemed suf-ficiently characteristic of him to induce the printer, hoping to in-crease sales of a decidedly creaky comedy, The Puritan: or, the Widowof Watling Street, to publish it in 1607 with the ascription “Writtenby W. S.” (The ascription seems to have led the editors of the ThirdFolio of Shakespeare’s Works [1664] to include it in their text.)The plot of the comedy, whose style does not remotely resembleShakespeare’s, hinges on an attempt by the clever scholar, youngGeorge Pyeboard, to persuade a wealthy London widow that herdeceased husband, a grasping Puritan, lies in Purgatory and willsuffer there unless she and her daughters change their marriage


plans. “Widow, I have been a mere stranger for these parts that youlive in,” George declares, launching his strategy, “nor did I everknow the Husband of you, and Father of them, but I truly know bycertain spiritual Intelligence, that he is in Purgatory.” The widowresponds with the appropriate Protestant religious zeal: “Purga-tory? tuh; that word deserves to be spit upon; I wonder that a manof sober tongue, as you seem to be, should have the folly to believethere’s such a place.” But George persists:

Well Lady, in cold blood I speak it, I assure you that there is aPurgatory, in which place I know your husband to reside, andwherein he is like to remain, till the dissolution of the world,till the last general Bonfire: when all the earth shall melt intonothing, and the Seas scald their finny labourers: so long ishis abidance, unless you alter the property of your purpose,together with each of your Daughters theirs, that is, the pur-pose of single life in yourself and your eldest Daughter, andthe speedy determination of marriage in your youngest.18

The resolution of this sly device does not concern us, but it is ofinterest that the play could have been passed off as Shakespeare’s,since it suggests that his name may have been associated with sto-ries of Protestants confronted by purgatorial spirits, stories obvi-ously relevant to Hamlet.Alternatively, his name may have been associated with the staging

of false or fraudulent ghosts. Yet Shakespeare never depicts unrealghosts as deliberate deceptions, only as mistakes or delusions. Ifthis type of depiction associates his plays at least in part with askeptical challenge to ghost sightings—one that was perfectly com-patible with Catholicism as well as Protestantism19—it does not con-stitute evidence of full-scale skepticism, nor does it link Shake-speare at all with the Protestant argument that ghosts, when theyare not simply frauds, are demons. (That argument is given dra-matic currency in Marlowe’s Helen.) What it does suggest is thatShakespeare was fascinated by the way in which disoriented or anx-ious people construct desperate explanatory hypotheses—his con-temporary Gascoigne called them “supposes”—about their world.20


Hence, to take a relatively minor instance, in one of his earliestplays, The Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare folds belief in ghosts intoa range of other fearful fantasies—witches, sorcerers, fairies, gob-lins, and the like—that arise from the screwball confusion that be-sets the characters. In the giddy scene at the end of the comedy,the two sets of twins who have been constantly mistaken for oneanother are finally brought onstage together. “I see two husbands,”declares Adriana, staring at Antipholus of Ephesus and his identi-cal twin, “or mine eyes deceive me.” She is offering in effect twohypotheses for the weird double image she is seeing: either twohusbands or an optical illusion. To these hypotheses, both ofwhich, as we know, are incorrect, the duke adds a third:

One of these men is genius to the other:And so of these, which is the natural man,And which the spirit? Who deciphers them?

(5.1.332–35)

The duke begins with a seemingly definitive explanation—onethat has the advantage of that impressive-sounding term genius,highly appropriate for the classical setting—but immediately runsinto difficulty.21 The two figures before his eyes do not have theconvenient marks that distinguish between representation and re-ality, the former more faded, schematic, or intangible than thelatter. Instead they each make the identical strong claim to reality,just as the two servants, the twin Dromios, proceed to do:

DROMIO OF SYRACUSE. I, sir, am Dromio. Command him away.DROMIO OF EPHESUS. I, sir, am Dromio. Pray let me stay.

(5.1.336–37)

It is at this point of heightened confusion that Antipholus of Syra-cuse suddenly notices his father, whom he believes to be far away,and raises the possibility that he is seeing a ghost: “Egeon, art thounot? Or else his ghost” (5.1.338). No sooner is this possibilityvoiced than it is laid to rest: though they return several times tothe possibility that they are dreaming, the characters begin to sortout that they are seeing something nomore (or less) amazing than


identical twins. What looked like spirit—genius or ghost, hallucina-tion or dream—is flesh.Shakespeare liked this scene sufficiently well that he wrote an-

other version of it in Twelfth Night, playing once again with theuncanniness of twins. “Do I stand there?” asks Sebastian, gawkingat Cesario, who appears to him, as to everyone else, to be his per-fect double.

I never had a brother,Nor can there be that deity in my nature,Of here and everywhere. I had a sister,Whom the blind waves and surges have devoured.Of charity, what kin are you to me?What countryman? What name? What parentage?

(5.1.219–24)

The solution to the mystery is so obvious—a simple change ofclothes will turn Cesario back into his twin sister, Viola—that Sebas-tian seems remarkably dim-witted. Yet the quick and resourcefulViola is also utterly perplexed, as she answers the flurry of ques-tions and tentatively speculates that she may be seeing a ghost:

Of Messaline. Sebastian was my father;Such a Sebastian was my brother, too.So went he suited to his watery tomb.If spirits can assume both form and suitYou come to fright us.

(5.1.225–29)

If the phrase “both form and suit” is not merely a hendiadys for“suitable form,” the issue here is not only whether the spirits of thedead can return to the fleshly form they once possessed but alsowhether they can dress as if they were again alive.22 Sebastian’sreply confirms that he is a spirit, but only in the sense in whicheveryone alive is a spirit. He picks up the issue of suit as dress orcostume—intensely important in this play of cross-dressing anddisguise—to turn it into a reference to the flesh in which his spirithas been clothed from the moment of conception:


A spirit I am indeed,But am in that dimension grossly cladWhich from the womb I did participate.Were you a woman, as the rest goes even,I should my tears let fall upon your cheek,And say “Thrice-welcome, drowned Viola.”

(5.1.229–34)

There are no ghosts in Comedy of Errors or Twelfth Night, onlyperplexing, unnerving resemblances that turn out to have an en-tirely naturalistic explanation. Though both comedies are deeplysensitive to the tragic potential built into their plots, in neither isthe audience for even one moment induced to share the fear: thecharacter’s alarm—“You come to fright us”—is an occasion forlaughter, qualified perhaps by a measure of compassion. Thinkingthat you are seeing a ghost is revealed to be a false surmise. It is adesperate hypothesis advanced, in bafflement and rising panic, toaccount for the extraordinary apparition of someone one does notexpect to see. Ghosts are the effects of anxious misreading.In A Midsummer Night’s Dream Theseus gives an account of such

misreadings, which he attributes to the overheated imagination or“shaping fantasies” that link lunatics, lovers, and poets. The mad-man, he says, “sees more devils than vast hell can hold”; the franticlover sees “Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.” And the poet ineffect combines the phantasmatic powers of both:

The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,And as imagination bodies forthThe forms of things unknown, the poet’s penTurns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothingA local habitation and a name.

(5.1.5–17)

This account in effect sketches the whole basis of the Protestantuse of the term “poetry” to characterize Purgatory. It gets at thecosmic reach of the poetic imagination, its bold assigning of formto what in fact is utterly unknown, its capacity to create virtual bod-


ies, its fashioning of nothing into a specific, named place wherethese shapes may dwell. All of this constitutes a brief for withhold-ing belief: “I never may believe / These antique fables, nor thesefairy toys” (5.1.2–3).Yet, of course, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, itself an antique fable,

playfully undermines Theseus’s skepticism by bringing “fairy toys”onto the stage. The fairies are not exactly ghosts, but they are notexactly not ghosts either. Robin Goodfellow urges haste becausethe dawn is not far off,

At whose approach ghosts, wand’ring here and there,Troop home to churchyards; damned spirits allThat in cross-ways and floods have burialAlready to their wormy beds are gone,For fear lest day should look their shames upon.They wilfully themselves exiled from light,And must for aye consort with black-browed night.

(3.2.382–88)

Two different types of spirits are quickly sketched here: the firstare the ghosts of those who have been buried in churchyards; thesecond are the ghosts of those who have not received proper funer-als. (In the latter category are those who have drowned and hencehave died without proper ceremonies, and those who have com-mitted suicide and hence have been buried at crossroads, wheremen will walk disrespectfully upon their graves.) Catholic and Prot-estant theologians would have assigned these spirits a place in theotherworld: the aim, as we have seen, was to lock away the deadsecurely in a sphere from which they could seldom, if ever, return.But the universe of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is hyperanimated,especially at night, by restless wanderers.Oberon, the fairy king, goes out of his way (slightly awkwardly,

since Robin must surely grasp the point already) to differentiatehimself and his fellow fairies from spirits that have to spend theirdays in wormy beds. “But we are spirits of another sort,” he rejoins,

I with the morning’s love have oftmade sport,And like a forester the groves may tread


Even till the eastern gate, all fiery red,Opening on Neptune with fair blessed beamsTurns into yellow gold his salt green streams.

(3.2.389–94)

It is not clear whether Oberon is saying that the fairies are a specialtype of ghosts permitted to remain at large during the whole day;or that they are granted a few daylight hours (until dawn gives wayto the actual appearance of the sun); or that they are not ghosts atall. Having made a self-congratulatory distinction of some kind orother, he nonetheless agrees that the tasks he has assigned shouldbe done quickly:

But notwithstanding, haste; make no delay;We may effect this business yet ere day.

(3.2.395–96)

This prudent haste leaves a lingering doubt about how sharp thedifference actually is between ghosts and fairies.Perhaps in the contentious atmosphere of the sixteenth century

there would have been room for heated controversy about evensuch an absurd issue or at least for a sense of grave annoyance onthe part of one concerned group or another. Pious Catholics andProtestants alike could well have felt that their beliefs about theafterlife were being mocked. Shakespeare gives the spirit of mock-ery a local habitation and a name in the person of Puck, but theplaywright is not eager to pick a quarrel. Indeed, Shakespeare isextraordinarily good throughout his career at knowing just howfar he can go without, as it were, getting the police called; com-pared with Marlowe and Jonson, he is a marvel of prudence. Herein A Midsummer Night’s Dream all controversies are made moot bythe pervasive suggestion, fully articulated in the epilogue, that thewhole spectacle is unreal:

If we shadows have offended,Think but this, and all is mended:That you have but slumbered here,While these visions did appear;


And this weak and idle theme,No more yielding but a dream.

(Epilogue 1–6)

SPECTRAL DREAMS

But dreams, as Shakespeare understood, are hardly as innocent asPuck’s sly apology suggests. In its zany, indirect way, the play is adevastating critique of those—like the polemicists against Purga-tory—who view the imagination as the diametrical opposite of thetruth. After all, in AMidsummer Night’s Dream, there are strong hintsthat dreams and idle fantasies reveal truths that waking conscious-ness, naively confident in its own grasp of reality, cannot recognizeor acknowledge. Bottom actually was in the arms of the fairyqueen, and he is precisely the ass that his dream depicts him to be.Even the fantastic imagery of poor Hermia’s nightmare—“Me-thought a serpent ate my heart away, / And you sat smiling at hiscruel prey” (2.2.155–56)—turns out to anticipate Lysander’s sadis-tic cruelty a few moments later. And these are, after all, only thedreams of a play in which we are assured that every Jack will havehis Jill. It is the game of A Midsummer Night’s Dream—indeed, thedeep game of virtually all of Shakespeare’s comedies—to contain,just barely, the wild and destructive energies that they release, yok-ing them like boisterous, unruly horses to the traces of the conven-tional marriage plots. No comparable constraints govern the his-tories and tragedies, plays in which dreams of terror at onceprophesy the future and are haunted by ghosts.The uncanny power of these spectral dreams depends in part

on their reality claim. Shakespearean comedies tend to emphasizetheir fantastic nature, figured in moonlit Athenian woods or theseacoast of Illyria. By contrast, the histories and tragedies alike in-sist that the terrible events they depict are historically real, an insis-tence that intensifies the weirdness of their ghostly dreams. In anearly history, Richard III, and an early tragedy, Julius Caesar, ghostsfigure not as false surmises or colorful folk beliefs but as somethingelse, something altogether more ominous. What this somethingelse is, however, is difficult to specify. It would not be accurate to


characterize them as figures from the late medieval theologicalimagination, and it is also misleading and evasive to call themmereclassical conventions. Their classical lineage is indeed important,but precisely because Greek and Roman histories, as well as plays,include, as part of the fabric of historical actuality, curses, omens,prophetic dreams, and ghosts.To get at their peculiar force, or to make that force seem some-

thing other than quaint, I want to make a detour to two dreams ofterror, dreams dreamt during the 1930s and brought together byCharlotte Beradt in The Third Reich of Dreams. The first is the dreamof a doctor in 1934:

It was about nine o’clock in the evening. My consultationswere over, and I was just stretching out on the couch to relaxwith a book on Matthias Grunewald, when suddenly the wallsof my room and then my apartment disappeared. I lookedaround and discovered to my horror that as far as the eyecould see no apartment had walls anymore. Then I heard aloudspeaker boom, “According to the decree of the 17th ofthis month on the Abolition of Walls. . . .”

The second is the dream of a lawyer in the same period:

Two benches were standing side by side in Tiergarten Park,one painted the usual green and the other yellow [in thosedays, Jews were permitted to sit only on specially painted yel-low benches]. There was a trash can between them. I sat downon the trash can and hung a sign around my neck like theones blind beggars sometimes wear—also like those the gov-ernment makes “race violators” wear. It read, “I Make Room forTrash If Need Be.”23

In hindsight these dreams had a horrible premonitory power,but their significance extends beyond this power. They bear wit-ness to the deep, inward experience of malevolent absolutism, itsability to penetrate the mind, in sleep, in fantasy, in the fictions wedaily and nightly create, even as it could also penetrate the body.24

Terror experienced in sleep, as in waking reality, had an importantfunction in the ability of the Third Reich to carry out an inherently


difficult program ofmass murder, difficult because somany peopleneeded to be confused, disoriented, deceived, and made to feelabsolutely powerless, even in the face of incontrovertible evidenceof unappeasably violent malice against them. Of course, for themost part the victimswere absolutely powerless, but it was importantfor the murderers to carry out their crimes in orderly fashion, tokeep the greater part of their victims from attempting to resist orescape or simply from running about in a mad, blind panic.25 Ter-ror served to block many of the ordinary, self-protective responsesof conscious, sentient people marked out for elimination and atleast partially aware that they were somarked. Deeply terrified peo-ple seemed to act as if they were in a dream, as if they were caughtin an immobilizing light, as if they were already dead.26

“Terror is not simply dreamed,” Reinhart Koselleck remarksabout these traces of the wounded inner lives of the German Jewsin the 1930s; “the dreams are themselves components of the ter-ror.” What is perhaps most striking about the dreams I havequoted, however, is not their terror but rather their weird, grimwit, a terrible, mirthless laughter deeply in touch with the processby which the psychological and structural malevolence of the Naziswould eventually realize itself fully in the world.27 The sudden re-moval by decree of the protective walls around the individual andthe whole community of which the individual is part, the radicalloss of both the dreamer’s professional identity as a surgeon andhis cultural identity as a reader of books on German high art, thetransformation of a person into litter or something less than litter:these are visionary apprehensions of murder in the making, appre-hensions conveyed, as dreams so often do, with poetic deftness.The intimations of grotesque humor in several of the details—thebellowing loudspeaker with its bureaucratic language, for exam-ple, or the sign that those designated as human refuse must placearound their own necks—do not detract from the terror Kosellecksees in the dreams; if anything, the details intensify the terror byundermining the dignity of tragic pathos. But I think that thedreams tell us something important about the nature of the imagi-nation under extreme terror and direct us to the special functionof dreams and ghosts in Richard III.


Productions of Richard III in the late twentieth century (includ-ing, notably, Ian McKellen’s successful film, along with the stageproduction on which it was based) have almost routinely interpre-ted Shakespeare’s play, first performed in 1592 or 1593, as theimagining of a monstrous state uncannily like the Third Reich.The link is not merely a matter of costumes and set design cleverlyimposed on an old text in order to confer upon it an air of moder-nity; the interpretation works because Richard III is in fact a bril-liant depiction of a radically illegitimate regime of terror, a regimeheaded by a twisted, perverse, and utterly ruthless monster whononetheless exercises a weird charisma. Shakespeare’s Richardcapitalizes on every bit of weakness, vulgarity, greed, and fear inthose around him. He is personally bold and resourceful, but hecannot do what he wants to do alone; he depends upon the fright-ened, foolish, opportunistic, or soulless complicity of henchmen.And, though his evil is apparent to everyone, though he is the killerof children, he has, as he himself grasps and exploits, a pervertedcharm, an almost pornographic and vividly theatrical allure con-joining eros and disgust. He is a kind of waking nightmare, and heexcites dreams of terror in others.Richard’s words and actions bear comparison to the nightmares

of the Third Reich at which we have briefly looked. They sharean extraordinary current of grotesque comedy. In Richard III, thecomedy lies in part in the startling frankness with which malice isexpressed. “Your eyes drop millstones when fools’ eyes fall tears,”Gloucester observes of his hired assassins; “I like you, lads”(1.3.351–52). Or again, after hinting broadly that he wants Buck-ingham to get rid of the two royal children in the Tower, Glouces-ter becomes exasperated: “Cousin, thou wast not wont to be sodull. / Shall I be plain? I wish the bastards dead” (4.2.18–19). Thislurid murderousness is at the same time repeatedly conjoined byGloucester and his henchmen with the pretense of legality, a pre-tense that it is clear no one actually credits for an instant. “Whois so gross / That cannot see this palpable device?” exclaims thescrivener hired to copy the document that, like the Nazi decrees,gives to arbitrary violence the form of legality, “Yet who so bold butsays he sees it not?” (3.6.10–12). The point is underscored in the


next scene, in which Gloucester, pretending to be engaged inpious meditation, is drawn with exquisitely hypocritical reluctanceto accede to an entirely fraudulent public outcry for his corona-tion. We are never allowed to lose sight of what is actually happen-ing—a twisted, utterly unscrupulous, homicidal politician is seizingroyal power—but the spectacle of this seizure, like the earlier spec-tacle of Gloucester’s seduction of Lady Anne, is compelling andperversely comic.Still more important than the comedy is the uncanny transfor-

mation of fantasy into reality. In Richard III, as elsewhere in Shake-speare, dreams are not decorative touches or mere glimpses ofindividual psychology. They are essential to an understanding ofpower. One of the characteristic signs of power, and in particularof illegitimate power, is its ability to provoke nightmares, to gener-ate weird images, to alter the shape of the imagination. HenceGloucester is depicted from the very beginning of the play as traf-ficking in “drunken prophecies, libels and dreams” (1.1.33), andhe figures centrally in the nightmares of his brother George, dukeof Clarence, who has been imprisoned in the Tower. Clarence, whodoes not know that it is by means of Gloucester’s secret contrivancethat he has been arrested, awakens from a miserable night’s sleep,a night, he tells the lieutenant of the Tower, Brackenbury,

So full of fearful dreams, of ugly sights,That as I am a Christian faithful man,I would not spend another such a nightThough ’twere to buy a world of happy days,So full of dismal terror was the time.

(1.4.3–7)

Clarence’s dream, as he recalls it, begins with the fantasy of escape:

Methoughts that I had broken from the Tower,And was embarked to cross to Burgundy,And in my company my brother Gloucester,Who from my cabin tempted me to walkUpon the hatches.

(1.4.9–13)


At this point the dream plunges abruptly, with the suddenness withwhich the walls fall down in the doctor’s dream, into nightmare:

As we paced alongUpon the giddy footing of the hatches,Methought that Gloucester stumbled, and in fallingStruck me—that sought to stay him—overboardInto the tumbling billows of the main.O Lord! Methought what pain it was to drown.

(1.4.16–21)

The details that followmake clear one crucially significant differ-ence between the dreams of terror in the Third Reich and thedreams that Shakespeare imagines: the former are Kafka-likenightmares of those for whom the historical process that is remov-ing the protective walls around them or turning them into litter isfundamentally incomprehensible; the latter, by contrast, are thenightmares of the collaborators. It is not only those who were com-plicit with the tyrant who suffer, of course; Gloucester’s rise topower, with its “ruthless butchery” (4.3.5), has many victims. Butthe innocent victims in this play do not seem to have hideousdreams. Such at least is the significance in part of the very oddglimpse that the murderers Dighton and Forrest provide of thetwo young princes in the Tower just before they are smothered:

“O thus,” quoth Dighton, “lay the gentle babes”;“Thus, thus,” quoth Forrest, “girdling one anotherWithin their alabaster innocent arms.Their lips were four red roses on a stalk,And in their summer beauty kissed each other.A book of prayers on their pillow lay.”

(4.3.9–14)

Clarence, by contrast, is dismally aware of his own guilt, and hisnightmare manifests a queasy soulsickness expressed symbolicallyas an inability to die quickly and represented in startlingly physicalterms as an inability to vomit.28 “Often did I strive / To yield theghost,” he says, shudderingly recalling the pain of drowning,


but still the envious floodStopped-in my soul and would not let it forthTo find the empty, vast, and wand’ring air,But smothered it within my panting bulk,Who almost burst to belch it in the sea.

(1.4.36–41)

The soul—imagined as a ghost penned up inside his body—longs“[t]o find the empty, vast, and wandering air” precisely because itfeels the opposite: not emptiness, but horrible pressure; not vast-ness, but claustrophobic confinement; not wandering, but immo-bility and smothering. But when, in Clarence’s dream, his souldoes finally escape his body, the torment only intensifies, as heencounters the shades of those he has betrayed and murdered.Those shades—first “my great father-in-law, renowned Warwick”

(1.4.49) and then Edward, Prince of Wales, a “shadow like anangel, with bright hair, / Dabbled in blood” (1.4.53–54)—are thedenizens of a classical Hades, “the kingdom of perpetual night”(1.4.47), which Clarence has reached in his dream by passing “themelancholy flood, / With that sour ferryman which poets writeof” (1.4.45–46). Upon seeing Clarence, “false, fleeting, perjuredClarence,” the murdered Prince of Wales shrieks, “Seize on him,furies! Take him unto torment!”

With that, methoughts a legion of foul fiendsEnvironed me, and howled in mine earsSuch hideous cries that with the very noiseI trembling waked, and for a season afterCould not believe but that I was in hell,Such terrible impression made my dream.

(1.4.55–63)

How “real” is any of this supposed to be within the world ofthe play or the minds of the spectators? What is the status of the“shadows” of the dead Warwick and Edward? Clarence’s vision iscarefully and repeatedly marked as a dream, horribly vivid but dis-tinctly unreal. And within the general unreality of the dream-state,the vision is further distanced by its use of classical figures like the


sour ferryman Charon and the Furies, figures whom “poets writeof.” Yet the distance of these poetic fictions from reality is uncer-tain, the boundary marking off dream space from the play’s actuallived world distinctly porous. Recognizing, as Clarence does, thatit is only a dream does not completely free him from the “terribleimpression” that it made upon him, an impression confirmed andseconded by his interlocutor Brackenbury:

No marvel, lord, though it affrighted you;I am afraid, methinks, to hear you tell it.

(1.4.64–65)

If there is a small measure of reassurance in Brackenbury’s solidar-ity—the dream would frighten anyone and therefore it presumablyneed not be interpreted as a specific prognostication of the fateof the dreamer—the reassurance vanishes immediately with theentrance of the two murderers sent by Gloucester to dispatch hisolder brother.There is an odd sense in which these figures are a continuation,

a congealing into flesh, of Clarence’s nightmare. When he tries todissuade them from carrying out their orders and killing him, theyresume, at a highly implausible level of detail, the enumeration ofthe charges against him begun by the ghosts:

SECONDMURDERER. Thou didst receive the sacrament to fightIn quarrel of the house of Lancaster.

FIRST MURDERER. And, like a traitor to the name of God,Didst break that vow, and with thy treacherous bladeUnripped’st the bowels of thy sov’reign’s son.

(1.4.191–95)

These words articulate the queasy guilt feelings that resonatewithin Clarence’s complaint against the king at whose commandhe has been imprisoned:

Ah, Brackenbury, I have done these things,That now give evidence against my soul,For Edward’s sake; and see how he requites me.

(1.4.66–68)


The murderers are not phantasmatic embodiments of Clarence’sbad conscience, however, but rather figures from a nightmare intowhich he awakens—that is, figures from the play’s representationof literal reality. “How cam’st thou hither?” Brackenbury asks oneof them, who replies, with the dogged literalism that Shakespeareoften associates with his clowns, “I came hither on my legs”(1.4.81–83). These are not now oneiric shadows but stubbornlymaterial beings who have come to actualize Richard’s violent de-sign and the victim’s premonitory vision: after stabbing Clarence,the assassin, to finish him off, drowns him in a malmsey butt,thereby fulfilling in the flesh the dream’s horrible image. Clarencehas now in reality been forced, as he had put it, to “yield the ghost”(1.4.37), and at the end of the play, as we will see, he actuallyappears as a ghost.But what are we to make of this “fulfillment”? Later in Richard

III Hastings mocks Stanley’s dream—“He dreamt the boar hadrazed off his helm” (3.2.8)—only to find that it prefigures his end:“Off with his head” (3.4.76). “I, too fond, might have preventedthis,” laments Hastings when his death sentence is pronounced,“Stanley did dream the boar did raze our helms, / But I did scornit and disdain to fly” (3.4.81–83). Neither the murderers in theTower, acting on Gloucester’s orders, nor Gloucester himself, con-demning Hastings, knows the content of the ominous dreams, sothere is no question of any deliberate matching of the imagineddeath. There is a secret, ironic appropriateness, a kind of grim wit,in the deaths of both Clarence and Hastings, but the wit does notseem to belong to any of the characters, not even to that master ofgrim wit Richard, duke of Gloucester. Some other principle is atwork, but what?The answer lies within the dreams, but it is difficult to pluck out

the heart of their mystery. They have, as we have seen, somethingto do with the terror that Richard produces—but what exactly istheir significance? It is easy enough to assimilate them to the expe-rience of fear in people who were struggling to comprehend terri-ble events. But they interest us, in both theater and archive, assomething more than the expressions of fear. In hindsight, theyseem to possess a prophetic power, and as such they speak to an


anxious apprehension of something beyond raison d’etat, a longingto grasp what we might call the poetic or tragic structure of history.It is this secret structure that fascinated Shakespeare, and it is thisstructure that he associated not only with dreams but also and espe-cially with ghosts.“Why, then, I do but dream on sovereignty,” Gloucester had re-

proached himself in his great soliloquy in 3 Henry VI (Richard Dukeof York),

Like one that stands upon a promontoryAnd spies a far-off shore where he would tread,Wishing his foot were equal with his eye,And chides the sea that sunders him from thence,Saying he’ll lade it dry to have his way—So do I wish the crown being so far off.

(3.2.135–40)

Dreaming here means idly indulging in wish-fulfillment fantasies,but its meaning is transformed in the course of the soliloquy, asRichard proceeds to contemplate his own misshapen body, itselfthe incarnation, as he and everyone in the play imagine it, of aparticularly malevolent dream. “I’ll make my heaven to dreamupon the crown” (3.2.168), Richard proclaims, explaining to him-self that he can realize his ambition through his theatrical gifts:

Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile,And cry “Content!” to that which grieves my heart,And wet my cheeks with artificial tears,And frame my face to all occasions.

(3.2.182–85)

Theatrical performance here—the art of the hypocrite—is themaking of dreams into realities.If dreams in Shakespeare are not inevitably fulfilled, they are

like curses always eerily powerful and disturbing, disturbing pre-cisely in the manner of Clarence’s nightmare. Clarence does notfully understand, even in his dream, the historical reality in whichhe is trapped. He dreams not that his brother pushed him over-board but rather that his brother “stumbled, and in falling / Struck


me—that sought to stay him—overboard / Into the tumbling bil-lows of the main” (1.4.18–20). He knows that there is some rela-tion between the things he has done and the fate that seems to beovertaking him, but all he conjures up are the cursing figures ofvengeful ghosts. It is only in the terrible moments before he ismurdered that he learns, from the murderers themselves, that hisbrother is in fact his mortal enemy: “ ’Tis he that sends us to de-stroy you here” (1.4.231). And, even then, the awful reality is morethan he can accept: “It cannot be, for he bewept my fortune”(1.4.232). But the truth of Clarence’s dream does not dependupon historical accuracy; its truth is the experience of terror regis-tered in the imagination. In the course of the play, this dream-experience is hardened, as it were, into public, waking reality, notonly in Clarence’s own fate but also in the fate of the entire king-dom. This hardening of dream into reality is, in effect, what Shake-speare calls history. And the dream is itself always a significant partof this history.29

There is no strict dividing line for Shakespeare between the pri-vate and the public, between the bedchamber and the throneroom, between the imaginary and the actual. In Tudor law, it wastreason “to compass or imagine” the death of the king. This pecu-liar commingling of fantasy and reality pervades Richard III andmanifests itself in the force of dreams. Even when Gloucester iswooing, nightmares are close by, for terror is not restricted to thepublic sphere. “Your beauty,” he lies to Lady Anne, “did haunt mein my sleep / To undertake the death of all the world / So I mightlive one hour in your sweet bosom” (1.2.122–24). When he pro-poses a place for himself in Anne’s bedchamber, the lady replies,“Ill rest betide the chamber where thou liest.”

GLOUCESTER. So will it, madam, till I lie with you.LADY ANNE. I hope so.GLOUCESTER. I know so.

(1.2.112–14)

After she is married, Anne recalls this exchange and acknowledgesthat she has


proved the subject of mine own soul’s curse,Which hitherto hath held mine eyes from rest—For never yet one hour in his bedDid I enjoy the golden dew of sleep,But with his timorous dreams was still awaked.

(4.1.80–84)

It is, as these lines suggest, not only those around Gloucesterwho experience bad dreams but also Gloucester himself. “We donot know the dreams of the enthusiasts, the victors,” remarks Ko-selleck; “they dreamed as well, but hardly anyone knows how thecontent of their dreams related to the visions of those that werecrushed by these temporary victors.”30 Shakespeare obviously pon-dered this question and thought about the kind of dreams thatGloucester would have. “No sleep close up that deadly eye ofthine,” Margaret curses him,

Unless it be while some tormenting dreamAffrights thee with a hell of ugly devils.

(1.3.223–24)

From Anne’s account, we can conclude that here, too, Margaret’scurse was fulfilled, and that the victor had dreams of terror remark-ably similar to those of his victims. But the dreams turn out tocenter not on ugly devils but on ghosts.The dreams in Richard III culminate in the last act. On the eve

of the Battle of Bosworth Field, Gloucester, now crowned RichardIII, and his adversary, Henry, earl of Richmond, are both depictedin their tents, making last-minute plans for the morning’s bloodyencounter. King Richard repeatedly calls for a bowl of wine: “I havenot that alacrity of spirit,” he tells his henchman Ratcliffe, “Norcheer of mind, that I was wont to have” (5.5.26–27). Richmond,too, remarks that he has “troubled thoughts” (5.5.57), but whenthey drop off to sleep, the two opponents have radically con-trasting visions. To Richard come the ghosts of those he has killed.“Let me sit heavy on thy soul tomorrow,” each of them cries, bid-ding the tyrant to “despair and die.” To Richmond they turn withblessings, prayers, and encouragement.


The ghosts here appear to Richard and Richmond in dreams,just as they earlier appeared to the sleeping Clarence. But nowthey have materialized into actors visible to both characters, andthat materialization seems to confirm them as something morethan psychic projections. To be sure, they have a psychological sig-nificance: Richmond, the future Henry VII, is buoyant, hopeful,and unafraid; Richard is suspicious, self-hating, and terrified. ButRichmond has virtually no psychological depth, and Richard’s psy-chology is continually absorbed into political theology. The confi-dence of the one and the terror of the other are significant herenot principally as signs of character—for Richard is in fact repeat-edly depicted as bold and courageous, so that his terror is not asign of ordinary timorousness, while Richmond confesses anxietyjust before he drops off to sleep—but rather of the objective histor-ical process. Richmond awakens from his dream confident andrefreshed; Richard awakens shaking with fear:

By the Apostle Paul, shadows tonightHave struck more terror to the soul of RichardThan can the substance of ten thousand soldiers.

(5.5.170–72)

Political terror, the terror Richard inspired in others, has passed,through the agency of those he has murdered, into his own soul,and this passage marks the imminent fall of the regime.Richard’s nightmare derives from Shakespeare’s chronicle

sources. In Edward Hall’s The Union of the Two Noble . . . Families ofLancaster and York (1548), we are told that “the fame went” that onthe eve of the Battle of Bosworth Field the king had “a dreadfuland a terrible dream,”

for it seemed to him being asleep that he saw diverse imageslike terrible devils which pulled and haled him, not sufferinghim to take any quiet or rest. The which strange vision not sosuddenly strake his heart with a sudden fear, but it stuffedhis head and troubled his mind with many dreadful and busyImaginations. For incontinent after, his heart being almostdamped, he prognosticated before the doubtful chance of the


battle to come, not using the alacrity and mirth of mind andof countenance as he was accustomed to before he came to-ward the battle. And lest that it might be suspected that hewas abashed for fear of his enemies, and for that cause lookedso piteously, he recited and declared to his familiar friends inthe morning his wonderful vision and terrible dream.31

In Hall, as we see, Richard’s nightmare was of devils, an ideaShakespeare echoed early in the play inMargaret’s hope that sometormenting dream affright him “with a hell of ugly devils.” In theplay’s climactic scene, however, Shakespeare turned the figures inthe tyrant’s dream into ghosts. So, too, did the anonymous authorof a contemporary play on the same subject, The True Tragedy ofRichard III. There, at the comparable moment before the battle,the tyrant reveals that he has been having horrible nightmares:

The hell of life that hangs upon the Crown,The daily cares, the nightly dreams,The wretched crews, the treason of the foe,And horror of my bloody practise past,Strikes such a terror to my wounded conscience,That sleep I, wake I, or whatsoever I do,Methinks their ghosts comes gaping for revenge,Whom I have slain in reaching for a Crown.Clarence complains, and crieth for revenge.My Nephews bloods, Revenge, revenge, doth cry.The headless Peers comes pressing for revenge.And every one cries, let the tyrant die.32

These figures—accompanied by a “screeching Raven” that “sitscroaking for revenge” and other conventional furnishings—serveto link The True Tragedy with the conventions of Senecan revengetragedy. But the ghosts of the tyrant’s victims in this play do notactually appear onstage; they do not need to, because they serveonly as emblems of the villain’s “wounded conscience.” They func-tion in exactly the way that the devils function in Hall’s account ofRichard’s vision:


But I thinke this was no dream, but a punction and prick ofhis sinful conscience, for the conscience is so much morecharged and aggravate as the offence is greater and more hei-nous in degree, which prick of conscience although it strikenot always, yet at the last day of extreme life it is wont to shewand represent to us our faults and offences and the pains andpunishments which hang over our heads for the committingof the same, to th’entent that at that instant we for our desertsbeing penitent and repentant may be compelled lamentingand bewailing our sins like forsakers of this world, jocund todepart out of this miserable life.33

Conscience in Hall’s account is not simply a psychological ele-ment; it is an objective moral function, designed to produce (or atleast to offer the opportunity for) repentance and hence to enableone to make a good end or alternatively to confirm one’s owndamnation.Shakespeare uses many of the same materials but shapes them

to a different end. To be sure, his Richard, like the Richard ofHall or of the True Tragedy, understands his dream as the voice ofconscience:

My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,And every tongue brings in a several tale,And every tale condemns me for a villain.Perjury, perjury, in the high’st degree!Murder, stern murder, in the dir’st degree!All several sins, all used in each degree,Throng to the bar, crying all, “Guilty, guilty!”

(5.5.147–53)

But Shakespeare’s Richard rallies and manages to harden hisheart: “Let not our babbling dreams affright our souls,” he tells hisfollowers. “Conscience is but a word that cowards use,” he informsthem, “Devised at first to keep the strong in awe” (5.6.38–40).The terms that Shakespeare’s Richard employs here have a very

specific resonance for the sixteenth century: they conjure up apopular image of Machiavelli. A few years before Richard III, Mar-


lowe’s Jew of Malta (ca. 1590) began with a prologue spoken byMachevil, who gleefully declares, “I count Religion but a childishToy, / And hold there is no sin but Ignorance” (lines 14–15). InRichard Shakespeare obviously echoes and even exaggerates thedemonic qualities Marlowe associated with Machiavelli, but he alsoechoes and intensifies the subversive power of the figure: the dis-missal of conscience as a mere word, the challenge to the wholestructure of conventional morality, the skepticism about theologi-cally based claims to secular power, the Nietzschean questioningof the constraints implanted in individuals to make them obedientsocial and political subjects.This subversive power is at once released in Richard III—allowed

to strut about on the stage and in the imagined kingdom—andthen defeated, in effect, by ghosts. We could say correctly, ofcourse, that it is Richmond’s army that defeats Richard, and weall remember the tyrant’s famous last line: “A horse! A horse! Mykingdom for a horse!” (5.7.13). Yet Shakespeare is careful not toleave the play simply as the triumph of the stronger army or thetragedy of a king without a horse; it is the ghostly visitation on thenight before the battle that condemns Richard to destruction andconfers legitimacy as well as victory on Richmond.The power of the ghosts to bless as well as to curse, to reassure

as well as to terrify, marks the central difference between the night-mares of the Third Reich and the nightmares in Shakespeare’stragedy: terror as Shakespeare imagines it at once falls short of thedimension realized by the Nazis and reaches beyond the psycho-logical and political dimension it possesses for the modern world.Richard III seems almost innocent in its imagination of monstrousevil when compared with the actual accomplishments of ourcontemporary historical monsters. The ghosts that haunt the char-acters in Richard III are the play’s principal emblems of the in-tertwining of psychological terror, Machiavellian politics, andmetaphysics. They are precipitates of fear, emblems of alliancesand enmities, and an element in the moral structure of the uni-verse, a universe that is not, the play repeatedly insists, merelyneutral, indifferent, or empty. By bringing the ghosts onstage andhaving them address the two sleeping adversaries, Shakespeare


suggests that the dead do not simply rot and disappear, nor dothey survive only in the dreams and fears of living individuals: theyare an ineradicable, embodied, objective power. They function asthe memory of the murdered, a memory registered not only inRichard’s troubled psyche—“Is there a murderer here?” he asks ina panic upon awakening; “No. Yes, I am” (5.5.138)—but also inthe collective consciousness of the kingdom and in the mind ofGod. And, in their mode of blessing—something inconceivable inthe Senecan ghosts croaking for revenge—they function as wellas the agents of a restored health and wholeness to the damagedcommunity.

THE SPIRIT OF HISTORY

Six or seven years after Shakespeare wrote Richard III, he returnedin Julius Caesar to the idea of an apparition who appears to theman who murdered him and bears the burden of history. Thisapparition too is not represented as a fantasy, and though it is asso-ciated with dream, it is not emptied of reality. On the contrary,the play is careful to set its appearance in the context of otherspectacular signs of what Cassius calls “the strange impatience ofthe heavens” (1.3.61), signs that include ghosts that “shriek andsqueal about the streets” (2.2.24). Interpreting these prodigies asinstruments of “fear and warning / Unto some monstrous state,”Cassius, drawing the superstitious Casca into his conspiracy, namesthe threat in terms that have the odd effect of identifying the livingCaesar with a menacing apparition:

Now could I, Casca,Name to thee a man most like this dreadful night,That thunders, lightens, opens graves, and roarsAs doth the lion in the Capitol;A man no mightier than thyself or meIn personal action, yet prodigious grown,And fearful, as these strange eruptions are.

(1.3.71–77)


Casca does not need to be particularly brilliant to grasp the mean-ing of Cassius’s allegory: “ ’Tis Caesar that you mean, is it not, Cas-sius?” (1.3.78).Julius Caesar treats intimations of metaphysical horror with a

ruthless irony already implicit in Cassius’s words: Caesar, when wesee him in person, is all too human. Yet at the same time the omensand portents turn out to be true, and after his death Caesar proveswith a vengeance to be “prodigious grown.” From this perspective,the tragedy would seem to stage the defeat of skepticism, the hum-bling of political rationality by the conjoined power of dreamers,soothsayers, augurers searching the entrails of animals, and shriek-ing ghosts. “You know that I held Epicurus strong, / And his opin-ion,” Cassius tells his aide-de-camp on the eve of the battle of Phil-ippi; “Now I change my mind” (5.1.76–77). Everything Epicurusstood for—radical materialism, the mortality of the soul, theabsence of metaphysical rewards and punishments, the triumph ofclear-eyed reason over the night-birds of superstitious fear—crum-bles as Cassius recounts the ominous presages he has witnessed.And the defeat in Brutus is still more crushing. He had been strik-ingly indifferent to the signs that had terrified everyone else—“The exhalations whizzing in the air,” he remarked coolly, “Giveso much light that I may read by them” (2.1.44–45)—and now acomparable moment of reading turns into terror at the sight ofCaesar’s ghost:

How ill this taper burns! Ha! Who comes here?I think it is the weakness of mine eyesThat shapes this monstrous apparition.It comes upon me. Art thou any thing?Art thou some god, some angel, or some devil,That mak’st my blood cold and my hair to stare?

(4.2.326–31)

The lines trace a seesaw of conflicting responses: a dimming of thecandlelight by which he is reading (a dimming sometimes takenas the sign of a ghost’s presence) leads Brutus to look up. Startled,he sees someone—it is a “who,” not a “what,” that he perceives—


and then immediately calls into question the legitimacy of his per-ception. But his attempt to attribute the shaping of the monstrousapparition to the weakness of his eyes is shaken by its approach:“It comes upon me.” Once again he questions whether what he isseeing is real—“Art thou any thing?”—but the mode of direct ad-dress (as opposed, that is, to asking, “Is it any thing?”) belies thevery attempt to challenge its reality. He is in the presence of some-thing, something that is producing the effects of terror in his body,but he does not know what it is. “Speak to me what thou art,” hedemands again, and he receives a strange answer, an answer thatis quite distinct from the three options—god, angel, or devil—thathe has advanced: “Thy evil spirit, Brutus” (4.2.332–33).Presumably, in performance the actor will by his appearance

make it clear that his identity is what the stage direction says it is:“the Ghost of Caesar.” Yet the stage directions, in this as in otherShakespeare texts, cannot reliably be ascribed to Shakespeare’sown authorship; it is striking, in any case, that the figure identifieshimself not as Caesar’s ghost but rather in terms that seem to claimthat he is part of Brutus. The answer Brutus gets calls into questionthe relationship between the republican assassin and the man—perhaps his own father—whom he has killed; between the projec-tions of the mind or the eyes and the weird supernatural forcesthat seem to exist objectively in the cosmos of the play; betweeninside and outside.The exchange that follows does not explore these questions any

further. Instead, adhering closely to the account Shakespeare readin Plutarch, it displays Brutus’s stoical calm, once he has recoveredfrom the initial shock of the encounter:

BRUTUS. Why com’st thou?GHOST. To tell thee thou shalt see me at Philippi.BRUTUS. Well; then I shall see thee again?GHOST. Ay, at Philippi.BRUTUS. Why, I will see thee at Philippi then.

(4.2.334–37)

With that, the ghost vanishes. In the wake of a disappearance thatBrutus finds frustrating—“Ill spirit, I would hold more talk with


thee” (4.2.339)—he rouses his three attendants and verifies that,though (as he affirms) they cried out in their sleep, they saw noth-ing. The cries, of which the attendants were not conscious, seemto confirm that the apparition was not merely a figment of Brutus’simagination but was actually in the tent. But the fact that they sawnothing—quite unlike the monstrous apparitions that were widelyseen before the assassination—reinforces the odd sense not onlythat this haunting is for Brutus alone but also that it was somehowa part of him, his evil spirit.When, near the end of the play, Brutus encounters the bodies

of Cassius and Titinius, he names the ghost of Caesar as the causeof the suicides. It is as if the huge military enterprise of which heis the leader—“Ride, ride, Messala, ride, and give these bills / Untothe legions on the other side” (5.2.1–2)—is only a shadow play,behind which lurks the monster he had tried to destroy:

O Julius Caesar, thou art mighty yet.Thy spirit walks abroad, and turns our swordsIn our own proper entrails.

(5.3.93–95)

And when a few minutes later the battle has turned decisivelyagainst him, he confides to his officer Volumnius that the murder-ing spirit has come now for his own life:

The ghost of Caesar hath appeared to meTwo several times by night—at Sardis once,And this last night, here in Philippi fields.I know my hour is come.

(5.5.17–20)

Running on his sword, Brutus conceives of his suicide as thelaying of the ghost—“Caesar, now be still”—and his dying wordsreturn to the strange identification of assassin and victim that thespecter had disclosed: “I killed not thee with half so good a will”(5.5.50–51).What does this suicidal identification reveal? In part it is the

confirmation of a half-hidden psychological element in Brutus, aquality of epic self-regard and a capacity to envision himself as the


savior of Rome that link him to the megalomaniac he has mur-dered. In part it is the climactic enactment of a death-drive in Bru-tus, a desire to reach a point of absolute, rocklike stillness, thatrepeatedly surfaces throughout the play in his words and actions.And in part it is the final expression of Brutus’s fantasy of a cleankilling, a decisive, final, and pious act of civic liberation: “Let’s besacrificers, but not butchers, Caius” (2.1.166). In the end Brutushopes that by turning the sacrificer into the sacrificial victim, hewill be able at last to make Caesar “be still.”But nothing in the play—let alone in the subsequent history of

Rome—suggests that the spirit that appeared to Brutus at Sardisand at Philippi could be laid to rest by this suicide. The ghost ofCaesar bears a superficial resemblance to the vengeful ghosts whoturn up in Elizabethan revenge plays, but it is no accident thathe does not mouth the bloodthirsty curses that always mark theseSenecan hauntings. He is frightening and powerful not as theagent of the conspirators’ end but as the name for a political andsocial upheaval that no one, least of all Brutus, can fully control oreven comprehend. In the interval between the time that he isdrawn into the conspiracy to kill Caesar and the actual killing,Brutus feels a kind of soulsickness that he describes in a remark-able soliloquy:

Since Cassius first did whet me against CaesarI have not slept.Between the acting of a dreadful thingAnd the first motion, all the interim isLike a phantasma or a hideous dream.The genius and the mortal instrumentsAre then in counsel, and the state of man,Like to a little kingdom, suffers thenThe nature of an insurrection.

(2.1.61–69)

The self-analysis is brilliant, but like virtually all of Brutus’s subtlereflections on himself and his world, it is fatally flawed. For it im-plies that the soulsickness will be healed once the dreadful thinghas been done, but what in fact happens is that the condition only


intensifies and spreads. Now the inner insurrection becomes a civilwar, and the phantasm comes to haunt the entire realm. The appa-rition in Julius Caesar, surging up as if it were a figure in Brutus’shideous dream, tells us virtually nothing about the afterlife; it doesnot even seem to come from anything wemight call an otherworld.Rather, it is the restless spirit of this world, and the only messagethat it bears is a history lesson: “[T]hou shalt see me at Philippi.”

A DEEP PSYCHIC DISTURBANCE

The mistaking of a living person for a ghost, which we have seenin The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night, has a disenchanted, faintlycomic air, even when Shakespeare deploys it in tragedy, as he doesin King Lear. “Come not in here, nuncle,” the Fool cries, runningout from the hovel in which he has sought shelter from the terriblestorm:

Here’s a spirit. Help me, help me! (3.4.38–39)34

Kent does what the decent characters instinctively do again andagain in this cruelest of plays: he reaches out to the sufferer. “Giveme thy hand,” he says to the Fool, and then asks the question thatalso echoes on the battlements at Elsinore, “Who’s there?” “Aspirit, a spirit,” repeats the Fool, “he says his name’s poor Tom.”But Kent does not at all fear he is encountering a ghost:

What art thou that dost grumble there i’ the straw?Come forth.

(3.4.40–43)

The naked man who crawls out of the straw—Edgar, disguised asthe Bedlam beggar—is all too human, a poor, bare, forked animal.There is a second scene in King Lear in which a character—not

a fool, in this instance, but a madman—mistakes a living personfor a ghost. Even here there are distant echoes of the comedy offalse surmise developed in The Comedy of Errors and in Twelfth Night,but Shakespeare takes the undercurrents of desperation, confu-sion, and loss that run through those farcical scenes and gives theman almost unbearable intensity and pathos. Having returned to


England to fight against her sisters’ conjoined powers, Cordelia isreunited with her ruined, mad father and speaks to him for thefirst time when he awakens from a deep sleep after the terriblenight of storm and madness. “You do me wrong to take me out o’th’ grave,” Lear says,

Thou art a soul in bliss, but I am boundUpon a wheel of fire, that mine own tearsDo scald like molten lead.

(4.6.38–41)

The imagery of his suffering places Lear in Hell or Purgatory—aswe have seen, their pains were indistinguishable—but these realmsof misery are not for him located in the otherworld; they are hereand now, his waking reality. Hence he can accuse Cordelia ofwronging him by taking him out of the grave.“Sir, do you know me?” Cordelia asks, to which Lear responds,

as if he is encountering a ghost: “You are a spirit, I know. Where didyou die?” The eerie power of these words lies in their conjoining ofmadness—“Still, still, far wide!” (4.6.43), Cordelia exclaims—andtruth. The truth is not only that Cordelia is a spirit, if by this onemeans an autonomous living being (something that her overbear-ing, narcissistic father had found difficult to grasp), but also thatshe has already in some sense been destroyed and made into aghost by Lear himself. Behind Lear’s mad question—“Where didyou die?”—lies the hideously rash moment in which he has un-done his daughter: “Better thou / Hadst not been born than nott’have pleased me better” (1.1.231–32).Yet if Cordelia is from that moment undone—symbolically

turned into a ghost—it is only in the special sense in which humanexistence in King Lear has been turned into a purgatory in whichdemonic figures with names like Goneril, Regan, Edmond, andCornwall are given leave to torment flawed souls. The play insistswith fierce yet humane stringency that purgatorial suffering is thecondition of life, not afterlife. Lear’s belief that he and his daugh-ter are dead is a sign of his madness, evidence that he is “still, still,far wide.” The play is not set in the realm of the dead but in histori-cal Britain; the torturers are not demons but sons and daughters,


and the ultimate prospect is not salvation but nothingness: “I knowwhen one is dead and when one lives,” howls Lear, holding hisdead daughter in his arms, “She’s dead as earth” (5.3.234–35).Lear’s mad fantasy that Cordelia is a revenant is belied at theplay’s close by his terrible recognition that there are no returnsfrom the dead:

Thou’lt come no more.Never, never, never, never, never.

(5.3.282–83)

A moment later, when the old man loses consciousness, Edgar triesdesperately to call him back to life: “My lord, my lord. . . . Lookup, my lord.” But the deeply loyal Kent finds this attempt to reviveLear grotesquely cruel:

Vex not his ghost. O, let him pass. He hates himThat would upon the rack of this tough worldStretch him out longer.

(5.3.287–89)

“Vex not his ghost”: the words at once pick up the strange sensethat Lear’s existence is purgatorial and underscore the bleak hu-manism that locates his terrible suffering in “this tough world.”

IF LEAR’S mistaking his daughter for a ghost—“You are a spirit, Iknow. Where did you die?”—is a false surmise, like the anxiousmisapprehension that makes Antipholus mistake his father fora ghost in The Comedy of Errors and Viola mistake her brother for aghost in Twelfth Night, its symbolic truth-telling links it still moreclosely to a different Shakespearean perspective. While equallyskeptical about the “actual” existence of ghosts, this alternativeperspective is less interested in error than in imagination, fantasy,or what we might call the revelatory power of psychic disturbance.Take, as the greatest instance of this power, the ghost of BanquoinMacbeth. Whatever else it is, Macbeth’s belief that the murderedthane is sitting in his chair is not a mistake, an incorrect hypo-thesis advanced to account for an unexpected encounter. In theShakespearean ghost sightings we have thus far been examining,


everyone sees the figure whom one panicky character or anotherincorrectly identifies as a ghost; in the banquet scene no one elsesees the apparition. The vision of the bloody corpse is Macbeth’salone; all the others at the ghastly dinner party see only a vacantchair.“The table’s full,” Macbeth observes, when Ross requests that

he sit down. “Here is a place reserved, sir” (3.4.45), says Lennox,pointing to a chair that to Macbeth’s eyes is occupied, though heevidently does not yet see by whom. To this point Macbeth per-ceives only a mildly comic bit of social awkwardness: the host goesto sit down at his own table and finds that there is no place forhim. The moment marks what for the newly crowned Macbethshould be the resumption of the social role in which he has casthimself: “You know your own degrees; sit down” (3.4.1), he hasdeclared, casually alluding, as his guests arrive, to the established,hierarchical order he himself has in secret murderously violated.“Ourself will mingle with society,” he adds, somewhat uncomfort-ably using the royal we, “And play the humble host” (3.4.3–4). Buthis performance as humble host has been momentarily inter-rupted by the sudden, unexpected appearance of an uninvitedguest. I am referring to the arrival not of the ghost, who shattersthe whole occasion, but of one of the murderers, to whom Mac-beth, uttering his fraudulently hearty banalities, turns in midline:

Here I’ll sit, i’th’midst.Be large in mirth. Anon we’ll drink a measureThe table round. [To FIRST MURDERER] There’s blood

upon thy face.(3.4.9–11)

The astonishing muttered aside is a vivid instance of a rhetoricaleffect produced again and again in Macbeth, an expression of psy-chic and social dissociation. Macbeth in particular is repeatedlydepicted as “rapt,” suddenly absent from the ongoing social dis-course and caught up in secret thoughts or dark plans, while LadyMacbeth abets this dissociation by counseling fraud and conceal-ment: “[L]ook like the innocent flower, / But be the serpent un-


der’t” (1.5.63–64). But the effect is also an expression of unbear-able tension and pain: in these weirdly disjunctive lines of blankverse, it is as if a loose rope is suddenly yanked tight or a needleplunged into unsuspecting flesh. For an instant, Macbeth experi-ences not tension but pleasure: the blood on the man’s face, he ishappy to learn, is the murdered Banquo’s. But when he hears thatBanquo’s son Fleance has escaped, pleasure gives way to feverishanxiety:

Then comes my fit again; I had else been perfect,Whole as the marble, founded as the rock,As broad and general as the casing air,But now I am cabined, cribbed, confined, bound inTo saucy doubts and fears.

(3.4.20–24)

This sense of incompleteness and vulnerability is covered over bya resumption of the rituals of hospitality, to which Macbeth adds ahypocritical expression of concern for Banquo’s absence. But thecover is a very thin one; we have been permitted a sickeningglimpse of the seething, claustrophobic fear that lies beneath.It is our awareness of this fear, our knowledge of what Macbeth

is hiding within, that conditions the eruption that follows whenLennox points out the chair that has been “reserved” for the king.“Where?” Macbeth asks. “Here, my good lord” (3.4.46–47), Len-nox replies, and now at last Macbeth sees clearly who or what it isthat occupies his place. “Which of you have done this?” (3.4.48),he demands. For a moment Macbeth seems to be asking who hasplayed some horrible practical joke upon him, as if one of theguests had managed to place in his chair a full-size, uncannily life-like effigy such as was made for the queasy time between the deathof a king and the coronation of his successor.35 But his next words,spoken to the horrible figure he alone sees, makes it clear that theword “this” in the question “Which of you have done this?” refersnot to the weird apparition but to Banquo’s murder.Assuming wrongly that everyone can see what he sees—the

corpse of a man who has been repeatedly stabbed and has had his


throat cut—Macbeth at first instinctively tries to lay the blame onsomeone else, as he had earlier blamed Malcolm and Donalbainfor the murder of Duncan. But the thing in the chair seems to beleveling a direct accusation at him:

Thou canst not say I did it. Never shakeThy gory locks at me.

(3.4.49–50)

Lady Macbeth, who was not informed of the plot to kill Banquoand Fleance (in order to keep her “innocent”), cannot know whoit is whom Macbeth thinks he sees. Insofar as she grasps at all whatis going on, she could only conclude that Macbeth believes that heis haunted by the ghost of Duncan. Therefore, urging the companyto stay seated and not to take note of the “fit,” she tries to sleekover (to use one of her terms) what her husband’s words threatento disclose by returning to the psychological strategy she had ear-lier used, when urging him to screw his courage to the sticking-place: “Are you a man?”36 She then offers in effect a theory:

This is the very painting of your fear;This is the air-drawn dagger which you saidLed you to Duncan.

(3.4.60–62)

By invoking the air-drawn dagger—about which Macbeth has toldher—she is attempting to recall him to his own skeptical conclu-sion that there was “no such thing,” that it was but

A dagger of the mind, a false creationProceeding from the heat-oppressed brain.

(2.1.38–39)

Distanced from the effects of his own imagination, Macbeth couldgo on to imagine himself, stealthily approaching Duncan’s cham-ber, as a kind of allegorical figure, “withered murder” moving “to-wards his design . . . like a ghost” (2.1.52–56). To use the figure ofthe ghost as an image is precisely not to fear ghosts.We have, then, two starkly conflicting possibilities: either the ap-

parition is something real in the universe of the play—the spirit of


themurdered Banquo come to haunt theman who has ordered hisassassination—or it is the hallucinatory production of Macbeth’sinward terror. Macbeth never calls what he sees a “ghost”; it is, inhis words, a “thing” or a “sight.”37 When he attempts to drive itoff, he uses something close to Lady Macbeth’s language: “Hence,horrible shadow, / Unreal mock’ry, hence!” (3.4.105–6). But theact of addressing a shadow reveals the extent to which it seems tohim anything but unreal. He expresses astonishment not that theothers cannot see it—he never securely grasps that they do not—but rather that they are not terrified as he is, though he prideshimself on his manly courage. As if in a desperate display of thatcourage, he repeatedly addresses the specter, challenging it tospeak: “Behold, look, lo—how say you? / Why, what care I? If thoucanst nod, speak, too!” (3.4.68–69). Lady Macbeth, by contrast,drives home the shameful spectacle of her husband’s unmanning:

O, these flaws and starts,Impostors to true fear, would well becomeA woman’s story at a winter’s fireAuthorized by her grandam.

(3.4.62–65)

Ghost stories are a peculiar kind of narrative entertainment passeddown from one generation of women to another, designed to pro-duce an effeminate miming of fear at an unreal threat: “When all’sdone,” she says with barely concealed disgust and impatience, “Youlook but on a stool” (3.4.66–67).Which is it? There are ample grounds for thinking that the spec-

ter might be real. Stories circulated throughout the Middle Agesand the Renaissance of ghosts visible to only a single person, andthere were stories, too, of murdered spirits returning to haunt anddestroy their murderers. “It will have blood, they say. Blood willhave blood” (3.5.121). Macbeth in effect sanctions such stories byliterally representing the penetration of the ordinary world by de-monic spirits: the familiars and visions invoked by the witches,Hecate, the dark forces that turned Duncan’s horses “wild in na-ture” (2.4.16) so that they ate each other. It is at least possible,then, within the terms of the tragedy, that a specter only Macbeth


can see has come to haunt him. Yet the play cunningly goes out ofits way to unsettle any attempt to determine what substantial claimto reality the intimations of the otherworld—the world of ghosts,air-drawn daggers, mysterious sounds, disruptions of the naturalorder, spirits, and goddesses—actually possess.38

Macbeth sees the spirit of “blood-baltered Banquo” (4.1.139) asecond time, smiling at him triumphantly in the pageant of theeight kings that the witches conjure up out of the cauldron. Butwhat are the witches and what connection do they have to Ban-quo’s ghost? The witches, visible to both Macbeth and Banquo, aregiven many of the conventional attributes of both Continental andEnglish witch lore: they are associated with tempests, and particu-larly with thunder and lightning; they are shown calling to theirfamiliars and conjuring spirits; they recount killing livestock,raising winds, sailing in a sieve; their hideous broth links them tobirth-strangled babes and blaspheming Jews; above all, they trafficin prognostication and prophecy. And yet though their malevolentenergy apparently informs action—“I’ll do, I’ll do, and I’ll do”(1.3.9)—it is in fact extremely difficult to specify what, if anything,they do or even what, if anything, they are.“What are these,” Banquo asks when he and Macbeth first en-

counter them,

So withered, and so wild in their attire,That look not like th’inhabitants o’th’earthAnd yet are on’t?

(1.3.37–40)

Macbeth echoes the question, “Speak, if you can. What are you?”(1.3.45), to which he receives in reply his own name: “All hail,Macbeth!” (1.3.46). Startled by the titles with which they pro-ceed to greet him, Macbeth falls silent, and Banquo resumes theinterrogation:

I’th’ name of truth,Are ye fantastical or that indeedWhich outwardly ye show?

(1.3.50–52)


The question is slightly odd, since Banquo has already marveledat an outward show that would itself seem entirely fantastical: “Youshould be women, / And yet your beards forbid me to interpret /That you are so” (1.3.43–45). But “fantastical” here refers not tothe witches’ equivocal appearance but to a deeper doubt, a doubtnot about their gender but about their existence. They had at firstseemed to be the ultimate figures of the otherworld—Banquo ini-tially remarked that they did not look like earthlings—but nowtheir very “outwardness,” their existence outside the mind and itsfantasies, is called into question. Like the ghost, then, the witchesin Macbeth are constructed on the boundaries between hallucina-tion and spiritual reality and between fantasy and fact, the borderor membrane where the imagination and the corporeal world,figure and actuality, psychic disturbance and objective truth meet.The means normally used to secure that border are speech andsight, but it is exactly these that are uncertain: the ghost, visibleonly to Macbeth, repeatedly enters and exits without speaking;the witches, as Macbeth exclaims, are “imperfect speakers”(1.3.68), and at the moment he insists that they account for them-selves, they vanish.The play that begins with the witches ends with Birnam Wood

come to Dunsinane and with Macduff, a man not of woman born,hunting for Macbeth, in fear that the tyrant might be killed bysomeone else:

If thou beest slain and with no stroke of mine,My wife and children’s ghosts will haunt me still.

(5.8.2–3)

Is this merely a figure of speech? And, if so, what kind of reality-claim do such figures make? Virtually everything in Macbeth tran-spires on the border between fantasy and reality, a sickening be-twixt-and-between where a mental “image” has the uncanny powerto produce bodily effects “against the use of nature,” where Mac-beth’s “thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical” can so shakehis being that “function / Is smothered in surmise, and nothingis / But what is not” (1.3.139–41), where one mind is present tothe innermost fantasies of another, where manhood threatens to


vanish and blood cannot be washed off and murdered men walk.If these effects could be securely attributed to a metaphysicalagent, we would at least have the security of a defined and focusedfear. Alternatively, if ghosts and witches could be definitively dis-missed as fantasy, fraud, or metaphor, we would at least have theclear-eyed certainty of grappling with human causes in an alto-gether secular world. But instead Shakespeare achieves the re-markable effect of a nebulous infection, a bleeding of the spectralinto the secular and the secular into the spectral.Lady Macbeth is confident that if her husband grasps that the

thing he sees in his chair is a painting of his fear, a projection ofsomething inside him, then he will be the master of the situation.But—as she herself later finds in her sleepwalking—the things in-side you are more wicked than demons and more terrifying thanthe old stories authorized by grandam. Macbeth has said from thebeginning that he is willing to risk the punishments of the other-world; it is the “poisoned chalice” (1.7.11) of this life that worrieshim. The ingredients of that chalice include the “terrible dreams”(3.2.20) that shake him nightly, dreams not of the afterlife but ofthe here and now, including the maddening thought that theworldly benefit of his crime will be reaped by the heirs of Banquo.“Better be with the dead,” he tells his wife,

Whom we to gain our peace have sent to peace,Than on the torture of the mind to lieIn restless ecstasy.

(3.2.21–24)

Like Lear’s wheel of fire, Macbeth’s imagery of torture transfersthe horrors of souls in the otherworld to the experience he hascondemned himself to live in this one. It is, the play repeatedlyshows, no consolation to locate ghosts in the human imagination.If you are tormented by the threat of judgment, do not fear thelife to come; fear this life. “We still have judgement here” (1.7.8).If you are anxious about losing your manhood, it is not enough tolook to the bearded hags on the heath; look to your wife. “Whenyou durst do it, then you were a man” (1.7.49). If you are worriedabout demonic temptation, fear your own dreams: “Merciful


powers, / Restrain in me the cursed thoughts that nature / Givesway to in repose” (2.1.7–9). If you are concerned about your fu-ture, scrutinize your best friends: “He was a gentleman on whom Ibuilt / An absolute trust” (1.4.13–14). And if you dread spiritualdesolation, turn your eyes on the contents not of the hideous caul-dron but of your skull: “O, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife”(3.2.37).

SKEPTICISM AND WONDER

The ghost as the projection of fear, the ghost as the spirit of history,the ghost as the shadowy embodiment of deep psychic distur-bance: these three modes of representation are the principal waysthat Shakespeare brought the dead onto the stage. But what kindof theatrical response do they constitute to the great sixteenth-century change in the relations between the living and the dead?What would an audience, even remotely alert to the conflictingProtestant and Catholic positions, make of these figures? None ofShakespeare’s ghosts (or even the illusions of ghosts) is a demon,disguised as the wandering soul of the departed; none is a purgato-rial spirit, begging for suffrages from the living. They do not greatlyresemble the ghosts depicted in ballads or in public inquiries intopopular superstitions, nor do they conspicuously come from a clas-sical Hades.What are they, then? Perhaps part of the answer lies in a brief

comment by Reginald Scot in his great Discoverie of Witchcraft(1584), a book that Shakespeare seems to have encountered.39 “Ifor my part have read a number of their conjurations,” Scot ob-serves wryly of the witches whose power he denies, “but never couldsee any devils of theirs, except it were in a play.”40 Scot’s program-matic, skeptical agenda seems very far from Shakespeare’s contra-dictory, slippery, and complex deployment of spirits. Still, withoutaligning himself with principled disbelief, Shakespeare seems tohave staged ghosts, as Scot’s wry remark suggests, in a spirit of self-conscious theatricality. That is, his ghosts are figures who exist inand as theater, figures in whom it is possible to believe preciselybecause they appear and speak only onstage. The audience is in-


vited to credit their existence in a peculiar spirit of theatrical dis-avowal: “I know very well that such things probably do not exist,and yet. . . .”But Scot looks forward to the day in which the whole tangle of

fraud, credulity, and vicious persecution will shrivel into quaintfolklore: “[I]n time to come, a witch will be as much derided andcontemned, and as plainly perceived, as the illusion and knaveryof Robin Goodfellow.”41 Shakespeare does not want his audienceto deride and contemn the illusion and knavery of Robin Good-fellow or witches or ghosts. He wants, rather, to persuade his audi-ence to credit them, but only in the special sense in which an audi-ence playfully credits what it sees in the theatrical space of fictions.In the late romances, Shakespeare often highlights the fictive ele-ment, as when Cymbeline brings together ghosts, fairies, and witchesin a dirge sung over the body of a living young woman who hasbeen mistaken for a dead young man. The rustic Guiderius andArviragus find what they think is the lifeless body of the youth—Innogen in disguise—whom they have come to love. “If he be gonehe’ll make his grave a bed,” Guiderius says sadly; “With femalefairies will his tomb be haunted” (4.2.217–18). Then, turning tothe corpse, he adds, as if Shakespeare were thinking back to thelines about the “wormy beds” from A Midsummer Night’s Dream,“And worms will not come to thee.” The words have the slight airof an apotropaic charm, a warding-off made explicit in the antiph-onal lines at the end of the celebrated dirge, “Fear no more theheat o’th’sun”:

No exorcisor harm thee,Nor no witchcraft charm thee.Ghost unlaid forbear thee.Nothing ill come near thee.Quiet consummation have,And renowned be thy grave.

(4.2.277–82)

“Quiet consummation”: the mourners acknowledge that theyouth’s corpse will be consumed, but their beautiful prayer is foran end like the slow fading of flowers, and they pray, too, that his


soul be granted a comparably quiet vanishing. Their fear is not thatthe youth’s ghost will return to haunt them; rather, their obsequiesimagine a sweet sleep after death that could be threatened by un-wanted company or malevolent interference.The dirge in Cymbeline provides a quirky anthology of possible

beliefs about the afterlife, beliefs involving female fairies, exorcists,witches, and unlaid ghosts. To these, as befits a play that self-con-sciously braids together ancient British folklore and classical antiq-uity, is added yet another possibility: the ancestor spirits that werehonored in ancient Roman households. At the nadir of his for-tunes, the hero, Posthumus Leonatus, goes to sleep and has a vi-sion of his deceased family. To the sound of solemn music, thefigures of his father, mother, and brothers enter, in the somewhatambiguous words of the elaborate stage direction, “as in an appari-tion.” Circling round the sleeping Posthumus, they address them-selves to Jupiter and complain bitterly that the thunder-master hasnot behaved justly toward the worthy young man. The king of thegods should have been kind to an orphan; instead, he has allowed asuccession of misfortunes to befall him. “Peep through thy marblemansion. Help,” implores the spirit of Posthumus’s father,

Or we poor ghosts will cryTo th’ shining synod of the restAgainst thy deity.

(5.5.181–84)

Ghosts, then, in this vision, are deceased family members who haveno direct power to help the living, but who remain deeply involvedin the honor and fortunes of the household. They cannot undoinjuries, but they can lodge complaints against the all-powerfulgod who has permitted these injuries to occur. They make a loudnoise to try to catch the attention of a divinity who seems to havelocked himself away complacently in his marble mansion. And ifJupiter does not open his “crystal windows” (5.5.175) and look atwhat has been going on, the ghosts threaten to stir up trouble inthe “shining synod” (5.5.183) of the other, lesser gods.Evidently, this spectral threat is effective, for while he has been

silent through the litany of complaints and anguished questions,


the king of the gods now angrily rouses himself. The stage direc-tion calls for an impressive show of divine force: “Jupiter descends inthunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle. He throws a thunderbolt.The ghosts fall on their knees.” Hemay have had his windows shut, buthe has clearly been nettled by the noise from the celestial streets:

No more, you petty spirits of region low,Offend our hearing. Hush! How dare you ghostsAccuse the thunderer, whose bolt, you know,Sky-planted, batters all rebelling coasts?

(5.5.187–90)

“Petty spirits of region low”: in his complaint, Posthumus’s fatherSicilius had boasted of his ancestry, but Jupiter puts the family inits place.This is, in effect, a political model of spectrality: the ancestor

spirits have no control over events, but, if they are sufficiently well-born (as these are), they can cause enough disturbance in theouter regions of the court to catch the attention of the ruler. Aftermaking clear that he will not allow himself to be threatened(though the display of power suggests precisely that he has been),Jupiter then tries pacification:

Poor shadows of Elysium, hence, and restUpon your never-withering banks of flowers.Be not with mortal accidents oppresed;No care of yours it is; you know ’tis ours.Whom best I love, I cross, to make my gift,The more delayed, delighted. Be content.

(5.5.191–96)

Jupiter wants the ghosts to stop their racket: “Rise, and fade”(5.5.200), he commands, giving them a written token of his favor-able intentions in order to make them go away. Though they haveregistered his anger—“his celestial breath,” they say, “Was sulphur-ous to smell” (5.5.208–9)—the ghosts are pleased with the assur-ance they have obtained: “Thanks, Jupiter” (5.5.213).Cymbeline borders so often on self-parody that it is difficult to say

how seriously Shakespeare intended any of this to be taken. His


scene of spectral intervention is dressed in classical garb—set, aswe have seen, against the rustic talk of fairies and witchcraft—butit also seems a displaced version of certain Catholic ghost beliefs:the special ongoing link between the living and the dead in theirown families; the concern that the souls of the dead have for thefate of their descendants; the hope that these souls will intervenewith God on behalf of those they love. Even the tablet or bookgiven by Jupiter to the ghosts and then laid by them on the sleepingPosthumus’s breast seems to recall the mysterious book that, in theTractatus Sancti Patricii, persuaded the saint that he had not merelybeen dreaming about Purgatory.But when he awakens to find the divine token—“What fairies

haunt this ground? A book? O rare one!” (5.5.227)—Posthumusdoes not have a certainty comparable to Patrick’s, for the textseems to him utterly opaque:

’Tis still a dream, or else such stuff as madmenTongue, and brain not; either both, or nothing,Or senseless speaking, or a speaking suchAs sense cannot untie.

(5.5.238–41)

Perhaps this skepticism and bafflement, not unmixed with an oddcurrent of half-belief, wryly represents Shakespeare’s own attitudetoward the whole, weird, tangled cultural inheritance, the min-gling of folk beliefs, classical mythology, and Catholic doctrine.For all his doubts, his character decides to hold onto the odd, in-comprehensible text, “[i]f but for sympathy” (5.5.243). And, ofcourse, within the zany plot of the play, it turns out to be speakingthe truth.The deep link between ghosts and the power, pleasure, and justi-

fication of the theater is the thread that runs through the contra-dictory materials we have been examining: false surmises, panickymistakes, psychological projections, fairies, familial spirits, venge-ful ghosts, emblems of conscience, agents of redemption.42 Thereis no straightforward chronological narrative here, no linear movefrom skepticism to classical “quotation,” or from credulity to disen-chantment, or from mystification to irony (or the reverse of any of


these trajectories). Predictably, there is more scope for ghosts intragedy than in comedy, but even this generic distinction is notstraightforward. The mistake that makes us laugh in The Comedy ofErrors carries a stab of pain in King Lear, while the ruthlessly disen-chanted city of Julius Caesar and the Machiavellian court of RichardIII have scope for “real” ghosts called into question in Macbeth.What there is again and again in Shakespeare, far more than inany of his contemporaries, is a sense that ghosts, real or imagined,are good theater—indeed, that they are good for thinking abouttheater’s capacity to fashion realities, to call realities into question,to tell compelling stories, to puncture the illusions that these sto-ries generate, and to salvage something on the other side of disillu-sionment.In a play written near the end of Shakespeare’s career, The Win-

ter’s Tale, Antigonus is commanded by Leontes to bear the infantdaughter, whom he falsely believes to be a bastard, to a “remoteand desert place” (2.3.176) and abandon her there. Bound by thestrictest of oaths to carry out the cruel order and feeling himselfaccursed in doing so, Antigonus, having landed on the seacoast ofBohemia, relates a strange dream. The passage is long, but it needsto be quoted in full because its significance is bound up with thesense that we are hearing a story, specifically a ghost story:

Come, poor babe.I have heard, but not believed, the spirits o’th’deadMay walk again. If such thing be, thy motherAppeared to me last night, for ne’er was dreamSo like a waking. To me comes a creature,Sometimes her head on one side, some another.I never saw a vessel of like sorrow,So filled and so becoming. In pure white robesLike very sanctity she did approachMy cabin where I lay, thrice bowed before me,And, gasping to begin some speech, her eyesBecame two spouts. The fury spent, anonDid this break from her: “Good Antigonus,Since fate, against thy better disposition,


Hath made thy person for the thrower-outOf my poor babe according to thine oath,Places remote enough are in Bohemia.There weep, and leave it crying; and, for the babeIs counted lost for ever, PerditaI prithee call’t. For this ungentle businessPut on thee by my lord, thou ne’er shalt seeThy wife Paulina more.” And so with shrieksShe melted into air. Affrighted much,I did in time collect myself and thoughtThis was so, and no slumber. Dreams are toys,Yet for this once, yea superstitiously,I will be squared by this. I do believeHermione hath suffered death, and thatApollo would—this being indeed the issueOf King Polixenes—it should here be laid,Either for life or death, upon the earthOf its right father. Blossom, speed thee well!

(3.3.14–45)

The speech is carefully constructed to frame the apparition as afiction, very much like the winter’s tale “of sprites and goblins”(2.1.28) that the precocious Mamillius tells his mother Hermioneearlier in the play. Such scare stories—“There was a man dwelt bya churchyard,” the little boy’s begins—are suitable for the childrenof indulgent parents who will pretend to be afraid of ghosts, butthe mature, sober Antigonus is properly skeptical of them: “Ihave heard, but not believed.” Yet no sooner does he register hisskepticism then he launches into a full-scale recounting of hisdream, an experience of haunting so intense, vivid, and convinc-ing that he thinks to himself, “This was so, and no slumber.” Thisconviction—Antigonus’s certainty that he actually has seen a spec-ter in white robes, the ghost of Hermione—lasts for only an in-stant, before his mind recovers its adult skepticism: “Dreams aretoys.” Yet its influence is enough to lead him to follow the ghost’sinstructions, even as he nervously registers his awareness that he isacting superstitiously.


There is a game being played here—a toying with the boundarybetween dream and reality, credulity and skepticism—but what ex-actly is the game? Though Antigonus is a minor character, Shake-speare sketches enough of his psychological state to suggest aheightened susceptibility to illusion, something that the play ex-plores more fully in Leontes’ psychotic suspicion. The benevolentAntigonus has tried to save the innocent babe but instead findshimself bound by the most solemn oaths to abandon her to almostcertain death. His deep unhappiness is intensified by themiserablesetting: the deserted coast, the threat of wild animals, ominousskies that lead the mariner to grumble that “the heavens with thatwe have in hand are angry” (3.3.5). Everything in his situation,then, makes him susceptible to horrible dreams and more likelyto regard them with superstitious awe. To the extent that The Win-ter’s Tale is centrally about horrible consequences of taking fanta-sies as realities—the whole cause of Leontes’ viciously false accusa-tion against his wife43—then we are meant to distance ourselvesfrom Antigonus’s dream and to think of his ghost story as a psycho-logical projection. There is no weeping, shrieking woman in purewhite robes; there is only Antigonus’s guilt. The need for suchskepticism is confirmed when Antigonus reveals, after relating hisdream, that he believes Leontes’ charge of adultery—“this beingindeed the issue / Of King Polixenes”—and thinks that the spec-tral vision was conveying Apollo’s will that the bastard infant bereturned to the earth of “its right father.”Yet though the audience is amply warned not to credit the ghost

of Hermione, it is at the same time strongly induced to do so. Inthe scene directly preceding Antigonus’s vision, Hermione col-lapses and is carried offstage, and a moment later Paulina returnswith the news that “[t]he Queen, the Queen, / The sweet’st,dear’st creature’s dead” (3.2.198–99). Antigonus, already at sea,has had no way of hearing of this death, so the ghostly apparitionseems to have revelatory rather than merely psychological power.This power is immediately, apparently definitively reinforced whenthe specter’s prophetic words, “thou ne’er shalt see / Thy wifePaulina more,” are horrifyingly realized in Antigonus’s gruesomeend: “Exit, pursued by a bear.”


Which is it, then? Is the ghost real or unreal? In some sense theend of the play tilts back toward unreality: the statue breathes andmoves; Hermione is alive. If the audience listens very closely, it willhear a minor character mention that “privately twice or thrice aday, ever since the death of Hermione” (5.2.95–96), Paulina hasvisited the secluded house where the statue was supposedly beingcreated. The tiny detail is just enough to enable someone whowishes to believe that there was no ghost, and that Hermione hasbeen sulking for sixteen years, to explain how she has been receiv-ing food. But the explanation is little more than a joke at the ex-pense of anyone who is worrying about the whole issue of the ghoststory. This is, after all, a winter’s tale: self-consciously fictive, flam-boyantly theatrical. Where do we get ghost stories and lost childrenwho are miraculously recovered and statues that magically cometo life? In the theater. The theater is the place, as Shakespeareunderstood, where those things are permitted that the authoritieshave ruled illicit and have tried to banish from everyday reality. “Ifthis be magic,” as Leontes says, “let it be an art / Lawful as eating”(5.3.110–11).What is being made lawful here, within the theater’s specially

demarcated space of make-believe? The magic of the statue thatcomes to life and, behind this, only half-hidden, the magic of thecorpse that comes to life. And behind these stories lie certain otherstories that had been labeled as magic. Hence there is an odd echoof the Catholic Mass in the awestruck description of the oracle ofApollo:

I shall report,For most it caught me, the celestial habits—Methinks I so should term them—and the reverenceOf the grave wearers. O, the sacrifice—How ceremonious, solemn and unearthlyIt was i’th’offering!

(3.1.3–8)

And there is an odd, faint echo too, perhaps, of the old cult ofthe dead, less in the ghost that dooms Antigonus than in a peculiarexchange between Leontes and Paulina. In the wake of Her-


mione’s death, Leontes has determined never to remarry, for thesight of a new wife, inevitably less perfect than the one he hadunjustly injured, would, in his fantasy,

make her sainted spiritAgain possess her corpse, and on this stage,Where we offenders mourn, appear soul-vexed,And begin, “Why to me?”

(5.1.57–60)

Paulina agrees and enters into the fantasy:

Were I the ghost that walked I’d bid you markHer eye, and tell me for what dull part in’tYou chose her. Then I’d shriek that even your earsShould rift to hear me, and the words that followedShould be, “Remember mine.”44

(5.1.63–67)

There is nothing notably Catholic or purgatorial about this vision,and yet it strangely recalls Thomas More’s vision of the dead hus-bands looking in horror at the remarriage of their wives andshrieking to make themselves heard. And, as we have seen, whatthey want is to be remembered: “Let never any slothful oblivionraze us out of your remembrance”; “Remember what kin ye andwe be together”; “Remember how nature and Christendom bind-eth you to remember us” (227–28). “Adieu, adieu, Hamlet. Re-member me” (1.5.91).

) 5 (

REMEMBER ME

“ADIEU, adieu, Hamlet. Remember me” (1.5.91). If ThomasLodge’s recollection in Wit’s Misery and the World’s Madness (1596)is to be credited, an earlier Elizabethan play about Hamlet—theso-called Ur-Hamlet—featured a pale ghost that cried “like anoyster-wife, ‘Hamlet, revenge.’ ”1 Presumably, this was the play al-luded to in 1589 by Thomas Nashe, complaining about “trivialtranslators”—rank amateurs who “could scarcely latinize theirneck-verse if they should have need”—who read “English Seneca”by candlelight and then come forth with “whole Hamlets, I shouldsay Handfuls of tragical speeches.”2 Assuming that this earlier playwas not by the young Shakespeare, then we must credit someoneelse with the single most important alteration to the old story: nei-ther the history of Hamlet by Saxo Grammaticus in the late twelfthcentury nor its retelling by Francois de Belleforest in the sixteenthmakes any mention of a ghost.

There would scarcely have been a reason to do so. Saxo’s narra-tive is closely related to the great Norse sagas of violence, cunning,and revenge: Feng is envious of his older brother’s good fortuneand resolves to slay him. The fratricide is not a secret act; Fengjustifies it by claiming that Horwendil was a brute who had beenabusing his gentle wife Gerutha. Young Amleth is too young andweak to attempt the revenge that the social code manifestly de-mands. His task, then, is to survive until he is capable of killing hisuncle, but his uncle knows the social code perfectly well and canbe expected to snuff out Amleth’s life at the first sign of menace.Amleth’s solution is to feign madness: “Every day,” Saxo writes,

206 C H A P T ER F I V E

“he remained in his mother’s house utterly listless and unclean,flinging himself on the ground and bespattering his person withfoul and filthy dirt.”3 Though Feng is suspicious, the wily Amlethmanages to elude the many traps set for him and eventually toaccomplish his great task: he burns Feng’s followers to death andruns Feng himself through with his sword. “O valiant Amleth,” ex-claims Saxo, “and worthy of immortal fame.”4

The introduction of a ghost, changing the whole nature of thetale, strongly implies that in the Ur-Hamlet, the play performed inthe 1580s, the murder was hidden, and that the son’s obligationto act was not assumed by everyone but, rather, was proclaimed tohim by the spirit of his dead father. Possible confirmation thatthese plot elements were already in place before Shakespearewrote his play is provided by the strange German version of thetragedy, Der Bestrafte Brudermord, oder: Prinz Hamlet aus Daennemark,whose earliest surviving text, in a manuscript of 1710, seems tohave been derived from one of the plays performed by the Englishplayers who toured in Germany in the latter decades of the six-teenth century. “I cannot rest until my unnatural murder be re-venged,” declares the highly Senecan Geist, as he departs, to whichPrinz Hamlet replies, “I swear not to rest until I have revengedmyself on this fratricide.”5 Der Bestrafte Brudermord has many ele-ments that come from Shakespeare, but it also seems to containtraces of the earlier Hamlet play—and one of those elements maywell be the ghost crying for revenge.

Shakespeare’s Ghost, too, cries out for vengeance: “If thou didstever thy dear father love,” he tells his groaning son, “Revenge hisfoul and most unnatural murder” (1.5.23–25). But his parting in-junction, the solemn command upon which young Hamlet dwellsobsessively, is that he remember:

Remember thee?Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seatIn this distracted globe. Remember thee?Yea, from the table of my memoryI’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,

207RE M E M B ER M E

That youth and observation copied there,And thy commandment all alone shall liveWithin the book and volume of my brainUnmixed with baser matter.

(1.5.95–104)

Does the emphasis in the spectral command fall on “remember”or on “me”? Hamlet’s response to the “poor ghost” teases out bothterms, with his first repetition emphasizing the memory that holdsa seat in his brain and the second insisting that all the contents ofthat memory, save one, will be wiped away. Contemplating Ham-let’s wild and whirling words in the wake of the Ghost’s departure,Coleridge remarked that “the terrible, by a law of the humanmind,always touches on the verge of the ludicrous.”6 Perhaps the lawextends to this anxious insistence on remembrance, since it seemsfaintly ludicrous to imagine that Hamlet would or could ever forgetthe Ghost. Or, rather, Hamlet’s reiterated question precisely picksup on what seems to him the absurdity of the Ghost’s injunction:“Remember thee?”

What is at stake in the shift of spectral obligation from ven-geance to remembrance? In terms of plot, very little. WhenHamletfirst adjures the Ghost to speak—“Speak, I am bound to hear”—the Ghost’s response, implicitly strengthening the force of theword “bound,” is a call for action: “So art thou to revenge whenthou shalt hear” (1.5.6–7).7 Hamlet hears this call and urgentlydemands the information that will enable him immediately toheed it:

Haste, haste me to know it, that with wings as swiftAs meditation or the thoughts of loveMay sweep to my revenge.

(1.5.29–31)

Meditation and love figure the spectacular rapidity of thought, notonly the virtually instantaneous leap of the mind from here to themoon but that leap intensified by the soul’s passionate longing forGod or for the beloved. It is as if the desire for haste is so intensethat it erases the very person who does the desiring: the subject of


the wish has literally vanished from the sentence. Yet the meta-phors Hamlet uses have the strange effect of inadvertently intro-ducing some subjective resistance into the desired immediacy,since meditation and love are experiences that are inward, ex-tended, and prolonged, experiences at a far remove from the sud-den, decisive, murderous action that he wishes to invoke. Laterin the play Hamlet will famously complain that conscience—hereconsciousness itself—“does make cowards of us all,” that the “na-tive hue of resolution / Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast ofthought,” and that “enterprises of great pith and moment . . . losethe name of action” (3.1.85–90). This corrosive inwardness—thehallmark of the entire play and the principal cause of its aston-ishing, worldwide renown—is glimpsed even in his first frantic re-sponse to the Ghost, and it is reinforced by the Ghost’s command,“Remember me.” From this perspective, what is at stake in the shiftof emphasis from vengeance to remembrance is nothing less thanthe whole play.

THE QUESTIONABLE SHAPE

The anxious sentries on guard duty as the play begins do not use theword “ghost” to describe what they have seen for two successivenights. Barnardo asks only, “Have you had quiet guard?” to whichFrancisco replies, “Not a mouse stirring” (1.1.7–8). Horatio is lessreticent: “What,” he asks, “has this thing appear’d again tonight?”(1.1.19).8 “This thing”: the words assume nothing, admit nothing. Ifthe sentries have speculated about the nature of what they have seen,or think they have seen, Horatio is keeping a skeptical distance:

Horatio says ’tis but our fantasy,And will not let belief take hold of himTouching this dreaded sight.Therefore I have entreated him alongWith us to watch the minutes of this night,That if again this apparition comeHe may approve our eyes and speak to it.

(1.1.21–27)


Thing, fantasy, dreaded sight, apparition, and finally, simply “it”(32): none of the terms, not even “apparition,” directly engageswith the possibility of a supernatural visitation, though Marcellus’shope that Horatio may “approve our eyes and speak to it” comesclose.

Horatio is evidently regarded as a valuable presence on the bat-tlements because he is a “scholar,” and, as such, he might be ableto resolve the crucial question that hung, as we saw with The Gastof Gy, over all apparitions. How was it possible to distinguish theweird, exceptional, and deeply unsettling visitations of tormentedsouls pleading for help from the weird, exceptional, and deeplyunsettling visitations of demons bent on spreading corruption,lies, blasphemy, and heresy? Demons were clever, and it had longbeen understood that they were capable of insinuating themselvesinto human communities by pretending that they were souls inpain. What is the reason, asks one of the early church fathers, SaintJohn Chrysostom, that demons love to dwell in tombs? “Theywould fain suggest to the multitude a pernicious opinion,” his an-swer goes,

as though the souls of the dead become Daemons, which Godforbid we should ever admit into our conception. . . . “Thepossessed themselves,” it is replied, “cry out, I am the soul ofsuch a one.” But this too is a kind of stage-play, and devilishdeceit. For it is not the spirit of the dead that cries out, butthe evil spirit that feigns these things in order to deceive thehearers.9

How is it possible, then, to protect oneself from deception, to un-mask the stage play?

If an apparition appeared more than once, as the dreaded sightdoes in Hamlet, any alterations in its appearance might providesome guidance.10 The second apparition was often marked by acostume change: the spirit, which at first appeared in the clothingof everyday life and with the age and features that the mortal bodypossessed at the time of death, might now be clad in white. It woulddeclare in this way that it had been cleansed of its mortal stains,with the aid of the suffrages offered by the faithful, and was now


bound for Heaven.11 But there is no such reassuring change whenthe soldiers see the spirit return to the battlements, and Horatioattempts to determine its nature through a version of the questionsasked in the discretio spirituum:

If thou hast any sound or use of voice,Speak to me.If there be any good thing to be doneThat may to thee do ease and grace to me,Speak to me.If thou art privy to thy country’s fateWhich happily foreknowing may avoid,O speak!Or if thou hast uphoarded in thy lifeExtorted treasure in the womb of earth—For which, they say, you spirits oft walk in death—Speak of it, stay and speak.

(1.1.109–120)

These are the traditional questions—Quis? Quid? Quare? Cui?Qualiter? Unde?—and each of Horatio’s hypotheses, starting withthe offer of suffrages, can be traced to the ghost lore with whichwe have been concerned.

But when the thing first appears before his eyes, “in the samefigure like the King that’s dead” (1.1.39), Horatio does not initiallyaddress it as a ghost, though he is forced to concede the aston-ishing likeness. “Looks it not like the King?” the sentinel Barnardorepeats, “Mark it, Horatio”; to which Horatio, marking it, replies,“Most like; it harrows me with fear and wonder” (1.1.41–42). Thetriple repetition of the word “like” hammers away at the unnervingresemblance of the thing they are all witnessing to the king whosebody they have seen interred. In attempting to interrogate the ap-parition, Horatio immediately questions its right to this resem-blance or, for that matter, its right to appear at all:

What art thou that usurp’st this time of night,Together with that fair and warlike form


In which the majesty of buried DenmarkDid sometimes march?

(1.1.44–47)12

Horatio urgently conjures an answer—“By heaven, I charge theespeak”—but the thing that bears the “figure” or “form” of the bur-ied king is silent and stalks away.

As soon as it is gone, Barnardo returns to the skepticism thatHoratio, now pale and trembling, had initially expressed: “Is notthis something more than fantasy?“ (1.1.52). The apparition thensurges up against the background not of credulity but of disbelief.Having begun with a theory of psychological projection, Horationow believes in its objective reality, a reality to which he bears wit-ness, as if he were being deposed in court:

Before my God, I might not this believeWithout the sensible and true avouchOf mine own eyes.

(1.1.54–56)

For the fourth time in some fifteen lines, the likeness to the deadHamlet is reiterated, now by Marcellus: “Is it not like the King?”Horatio’s words in response—“As thou art to thyself” (1.1.57–58)—are an emphatic confirmation, but a strange one. Thestrangeness—if one stops to reflect upon it—has to do with anerasure of the sense of difference that enables one to distinguishbetween likeness and identity: Marcellus is not “like” himself; he ishimself. Since Horatio does not seem to be saying that the appari-tion is the old king—for by the sensible and true avouch of his owneyes he knows that the old king is dead and buried—his words“As thou art to thyself” have a different implication: they raise thepossibility of a difference between oneself and oneself. The possi-bility will not be fully explored until much later in the play, whereOphelia is “[d]ivided from herself” (4.5.81) and Hamlet “fromhimself be ta’en away” (5.2.171). But the issue is already latent inthe opening moments, when the sentinel calls out in the darkness,“[I]s Horatio there?” and Horatio replies, “A piece of him”


(1.1.16–17). Hamlet is a play of contagious, almost universal self-estrangement.

But the question of the apparition’s uncanny likeness to the kingis a special one, as the nervous repetitions of the same observationsuggest. Marcellus should look like himself, but nothing should anylonger look like “buried Denmark.” For the trembling witnessesall know what they do not need to say: that the corpse of “the Kingthat’s dead” can no longer resemble the king that they all saw whenhe was alive. The king’s actual body, were they to exhume it, wouldbear the signs and the smell of decay.13 They are seeing somethingelse, then, something perhaps that the Catholic Pierre Le Loyer,in a 1586 book on apparitions, calls a “phantasmal body”:

It is certain that Souls cannot return in their body, which liesin the grave, reanimating it and giving it the movement andlife it has lost. And hence, if they return perchance to thisworld by the will of God and appear to us, they take not a realbut a phantasmal body. And those who believe that they returnin their true body deceive themselves greatly, for it is only aphantom of air that they clothe themselves in, to appear visiblyto men.14

Horatio seems to be getting at this sense of the phantasmal (asdistinct from merely fantastic) status of the apparition when hepleads with it to remain—“Stay, illusion” (1.1.108)—and he seemsto confirm this status when, trying to strike at it with his partisan,he finds that it is “as the air invulnerable” (1.1.126). But what isthe nature of this “illusion”?

“Illusion” marks a difference between what they are all wit-nessing and what they know to be reality—in this case, the decayingcorpse. There is nothing imaginary about that corpse, even if theydo not see it before their eyes: they know that it is the inevitableconsequence of death. What they are seeing is not physical reality,however lifelike the resemblance: instead, as their responses sug-gest, the apparition on the battlements is a kind of embodiedmem-ory.15 It has, Horatio immediately observes, usurped a particularform, the form in which the king “[d]id sometimes march”


(1.1.47). Indeed, Horatio can specify the recollection implied by“sometimes” more precisely:

Such was the very armour he had onWhen he th’ambitious Norway combated.So frowned he once, when in an angry parleyHe smote the sledded Polacks on the ice.

(1.1.59–62)

But what kind of memory could this possibly be? Memory dependsupon a certain fading or dulling of the sense impression, but theapparition is too vivid. “ ’Tis strange” (1.1.63).

This sense of strangeness is immediately reinforced, in a different,more psychological register, when, in his first soliloquy, Hamlet dis-closes himself as tortured by obsessive recollections. Horatio and thenightwatch are terrified by the repeated appearance of an uncannyfigure that startlingly recalls the old king; Hamlet is driven tothoughts of suicide by comparably unbidden, repeated inward rec-ollections. He cannot get his dead father out of his mind:

So excellent a king, that was to thisHyperion to a satyr, so loving to my motherThat he might not beteem the winds of heavenVisit her face too roughly! Heaven and earth,Must I remember?

(1.2.139–43)

Evidently, the answer to this question is yes, since his mind immedi-ately and involuntarily continues to grapple with the same tor-menting images of parental intimacies:

Why, she would hang on himAs if increase of appetite had grownBy what it fed on, and yet within a month—Let me not think on’t.

(1.2.143–46)

Just as the Ghost on the battlements returns not in the sem-blance of the poisonedman whose flesh has hideously crusted over


but in the complete armor of the powerful warrior-king, so, too,the memories that force themselves into the prince’s conscious-ness—scenes of his father’s love for his mother and his mother’sdesire for his father—are at least on the surface agreeable. Butthey are all the more tormenting in that they remind Hamlet ofthe magnitude of his loss and the shock of his mother’s hasty re-marriage. And he cannot keep the images from pressing them-selves vividly upon him, experiencing them as a strange form ofcompulsion: “Must I remember?”

COMPULSIVE REMEMBRANCE

Such compulsion was difficult for Renaissance theorists of memoryto explain naturalistically, that is, without recourse to a notion ofsupernatural agency. Plato and Aristotle had set the principalterms for understanding memory, but those terms focused on stor-age and search functions, not on involuntary hauntings. Plato’smost influential metaphor for memory was that of wax in whichan impression is left. The metaphor expresses beautifully the wayin which the mind can keep the image of something that is nolonger present. It conveys, too, subtle variations, gradations, andeffacements of impressions, some cut deeply, virtually perma-nently, into the medium of memory, some others only lightly, mostslowly losing their original distinctness of outline and eventuallyfading altogether. There are variations as well, as the metaphorsuggests, in themedium itself: in some peoplememory is like warmwax, barely holding any impression at all; in others it is hard anddry, difficult to imprint but, once imprinted, remarkably stable; instill others, it is a well-tempered medium between these extremes.

But the unwilled, ghostly return and renewal of an old impres-sion cannot be easily accommodated to this scheme—how couldthe impression be renewed without a material body to reinscribeit in the wax?—nor does it fit comfortably with Plato’s other greatmetaphor for memory, the aviary. To be sure, we can imagineghosts flitting and swooping, like birds in a huge cage, but themetaphor, as it is developed in the Theaetetus, is not about uncannyreturns from oblivion but about frustrating evasions. Plato evi-


dently felt obliged to supplement his primary image of the wax inorder to convey what that image conspicuously misses: the sensethat memories often seem alive, fluttering, and elusive. The aviarymetaphor keeps a notion of storage—there is a particular place, acontainer, for those things that are recalled—but it eschews anynotion of systematicity, the sense (later developed by Saint Au-gustine and others) that memory is like a treasure-house or strong-box with distinct compartments where one can look for particularobjects. In the aviary, one must grope after memories that seemanxiously determined to fly out of one’s grasp.

For Aristotle it is the possibility of making a deliberate search—whether we think of it as lunging about in an aviary or reading waxtablets or sorting through the compartments in a strongbox—thatdistinguishes the memory of humans from those of all other ani-mals capable of remembering. Any animal, Aristotle observes, thatperceives time can have memories, but among those animals withmemories, only humans have the power of recollection. This isbecause recollection is a “mode of inference,” and inference in-volves deliberation, and deliberation implies reason, and reasonis uniquely human. These incisive reflections enable Aristotle toexplain, for example, why “things arranged in a fixed order, likethe successive demonstrations in geometry, are easy to remember,while badly arranged subjects are remembered with difficulty”(718). But they seem to make his account of memory even lesscompatible than Plato’s with any notion of haunting.

Yet Aristotle—who observes that the moving force of recollec-tion is particularly powerful in “persons of melancholic tempera-ment” (720)—comes closest to the central issue immediatelyraised by the ghost in Hamlet, an issue inseparable from the ghostas memory and memory as ghost: the perception of likeness. ForAristotle this perception is the way one knows, when one is con-templating amental image or phantasm that it is in fact amemory—the remembrance of something that belongs irrevocably to thepast—and not something that fully exists in the present. The mindis aware of a ratio between what is imagined and what actuallyonce existed: a memory is grasped as a likeness, as he puts it,“relative to something else” (716). To be sure, this likeness also


could in some sense be said to exist, but it is, Aristotle writes, likea painting—that is, both an object in itself and a likeness of some-thing else.

When Horatio goes, in the company of Marcellus and Barnardo,to relate to Hamlet what they have seen on the battlements, he isstartled by the prince’s sudden declaration, “My father—methinksI see my father.” What follows is a brilliant exchange, almost comic,about the boundary between memory and haunting.

HORATIO. O where, my lord?HAMLET. In my mind’s eye, Horatio.HORATIO. I saw him once. A was a goodly king.HAMLET. A was a man. Take him for all in all,

I shall not look upon his like again.HORATIO. My lord, I think I saw him yesternight.HAMLET. Saw? Who?HORATIO. My lord, the King your father.HAMLET. The King my father?

(1.2.183–91)

What buckles under the pressure of the apparition is the notionof likeness (and hence of difference) that underwrites Hamlet’srecollection of his father, or, rather, the ratio of likeness and differ-ence threatens to collapse: “I knew your father,” Horatio tells Ham-let, “These hands are not more like” (1.2.211–12).

At the end of Richard III, as we have seen, the bloody tyrant isterrified by the ghosts of those he had murdered—

By the Apostle Paul, shadows tonightHave struck more terror to the soul of RichardThan can the substance of ten thousand soldiers—

(5.5.170–72)

but the contrast between shadow and substance marks his stub-born hold on what he takes to be the reality principle. Richardclings tenaciously to a distinction between the images in his mindand the hard realities of the actual world, a distinction that enableshim to rally his spirits in order to urge his men into battle: “Let


not our babbling dreams affright our souls” (5.6.38). So, too, inJulius Caesar Brutus is horrified by the “monstrous apparition” inhis tent, but a moment later he too recovers his poise: “Why, I willsee thee at Philippi then.” The contrast to Hamlet, where there isno rallying of spirits and no recovery of poise, is extreme; indeed,in the case of Julius Caesar, the contrast seems deliberate. Poloniusmemorably recalls that he once played Caesar and was killed inthe Capitol, and Horatio invokes Caesar’s assassination just afterthe first apparition of the ghost:

A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted deadDid squeak and gibber in the Roman streets.

(1.1.106.7–9 [Q2 only])

In 1769 Lady Mary Wortley Montague speculated that by theseallusions Shakespeare intended “to captivate our attention by dem-onstrating that the poet was not going to exhibit such idle andfrivolous gambols as ghosts are by the vulgar often represented toperform.”16 This may well be true, but Shakespeare seems also tobe emphasizing the particular horror and intensity of the appari-tion in Hamlet, in contrast to his own depiction of Brutus’s stoicalresponse to Caesar’s ghost. The soldiers Marcellus and Barnardoare “distilled / Almost to jelly with the act of fear” (1.2.204–5),and Hamlet vows to wipe away “[a]ll saws of books, all forms, allpressures past” from his mind.

Hamlet has made the Ghost’s command his watchword:

Now to my word:It is “Adieu, adieu, remember me”.I have sworn’t.

(1.5.111–13)

The commandment, he proclaims, will live “all alone” in his brain;everything else will be erased. He has made it into an oath uponwhich he can swear and a watchword that he will daily reiterate.With no stabilizing hold on a distinction between shadow and sub-stance, such as we saw in Richard III, and no stoical apathy, such


as we saw in Brutus, Hamlet submits to an uncanny and yet actuallink between himself and his dead father, a link manifested in ter-ror, commandment, and the inescapable obligation to remember.

THE FADING OF REMEMBRANCE

But as the tragedy unfolds, Shakespeare weirdly and unexpectedlyconjoins memory as haunting with its opposite, the fading of re-membrance. If Der Bestrafte Brudermord, along with Saxo Grammati-cus and Belleforest, are any indication, there was no precedent inthe Hamlet story for the softening of the hard edge of memoryinto what Shakespeare’s play (like More’s Supplication) repeatedlycharacterizes as dullness. When Hamlet speaks of sweeping to hisrevenge, the Ghost commends him in terms that bespeak his ownfear of oblivion:

I find thee apt,And duller shouldst thou be than the fat weedThat rots itself in ease on Lethe wharfWouldst thou not stir in this.

(1.5.31–34)

And it is with this forgetfulness that Hamlet comes to chargehimself: “A dull and muddy-mettled rascal” (2.2.544). “How alloccasions do inform against me,” Hamlet berates himself in a solil-oquy dropped from the Folio text, “And spur my dull revenge!”(Q2:4.4.9.22–23).

It is difficult to know exactly what to make of these self-accusa-tions, since they do not correspond to what the play actually de-picts. That is, we do not see Hamlet dicing, wenching, or otherwisebehaving as if he has forgotten his father’s death and resumedthe agreeable amnesia of ordinary existence. He has, to be sure,assumed an “antic disposition”—a disposition far removed fromthe customary solemnity of mourning—but this consists of behav-ior such as mad speech and an indifference to dress entirely consis-tent with an excess of remembrance, precisely such an excess as welater see unsettle the mind of the grief-crazed Ophelia. If, in thecase of Hamlet, this madness is at least in part a deliberate perfor-


mance (though not perhaps as completely willed and controlledas Hamlet himself would like to believe), it is not because, in theabsence of real feelings, he is merely miming the symptoms of ex-treme grief. On the contrary, the court of Denmark has from thebeginning been preoccupied with Hamlet’s ostentatious mourn-ing—that is, with the complete absence in him of any sign of anatural dulling of remembrance.17

At the same time, Hamlet’s strange behavior in the wake of hisencounter with the Ghost—what Claudius calls his “transforma-tion”—is not easily read by those around him as the unequivocalsign of deep, unappeasable loss. If, as the princely avenger does inSaxo and Belleforest, Hamlet pretends to be mad in order to de-flect his uncle’s suspicion, his ruse is a complete failure, as indeedit logically had to be, given the shift in the plot from an open to asecret murder. In the sources, where the murder is a public event,feigned madness is a plausible ruse, since it would lull the mur-derer into a false sense of security. But a protagonist who has dis-covered a hidden crime and wishes to take revenge would obvi-ously be wise to conceal any sign of unusual disturbance, anyindication that he is troubled by feelings other than the ordinary,conventional symptoms of grief. As soon as he learns of the mur-der, a truly cunning avenger, of the kind Saxo celebrates, wouldbegin to feign psychic healing, not madness. Hamlet’s antic dispo-sition instead sufficiently arouses Claudius’s wary interest to leadhim to send hastily for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. He wantsto use Hamlet’s friends, he explains, to discover

What it should be,More than his father’s death, that thus hath put himSo much from th’understanding of himself.

(2.2.7–9)

“More than his father’s death”: Claudius thus suspects that mourn-ing is not the only or even the principal reason why Hamlet’s be-havior is so much altered, and in this suspicion he is joined byGertrude, Polonius, and Ophelia.18

It is not Hamlet alone, then, who believes that there has beensome dulling of his intense grief, some interruption or diminution


of mourning and remembrance by other thoughts and emotions.Virtually everyone around him speculates on the possible sourceof this interference: disappointed love, frustrated ambition, hismother’s overhasty remarriage. The revenge plot would seem toposit that the actual cause of this dulling is a shift from mourningto rage: that is, grief turns into the imperative to avenge his father.19

Claudius seems to suspect as much, though he obviously cannotand does not fully articulate to Polonius what he thinks Hamlet’smotive might be:

There’s something in his soulO’er which his melancholy sits on brood,And I do doubt the hatch and the discloseWill be some danger.

(3.1.163–66)

But Claudius’s suspicion is only partially accurate. If Hamlet wereentirely bent on vengeance, he could hardly berate himself fordullness, since he would be fulfilling his father’s command and hisown pledge to sweep to his revenge.

What has intervened to deflect a direct course of action andto blunt the sharp edge of remembrance? Most obviously, despiteattempts at something like the discretio spirituum, he is in the gripof continued doubts about the precise nature of the Ghost andhence about the trustworthiness of the Ghost’s account of themur-der in the garden. “The spirit that I have seen / May be the devil”(2.2. 575–76). This suspicion—the fear that the devil is manipulat-ing the weakness and melancholy that he recognizes in himself inorder to damn his soul—leads Hamlet to seek some further verifi-cation, some independent evidence of his uncle’s guilt. Only after“The Mousetrap” provokes Claudius’s anger and alarm are Ham-let’s doubts about the Ghost’s reliability resolved: “I’ll take theGhost’s word for a thousand pound” (3.2.263–64). When, a fewminutes later, he does not avail himself of the opportunity to killClaudius at prayer, it is not because he still questions the truth ofthe Ghost’s revelation but because he does not wish to take hisuncle “in the purging of his soul” (3.4.85). He wishes instead tokill him


When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage,Or in th’incestuous pleasure of his bed,At gaming, swearing, or about some actThat has no relish of salvation in it,

(3.3.89–92)

and so send him straight to Hell. Indeed, immediately afterward,in his mother’s closet, Hamlet thinks he may have caught his uncleprecisely in such an act—spying behind the arras—and does nothesitate to run him through: “Is it the King?” (3.4.25).

Though he turns out to have taken Polonius’s life rather thanClaudius’s—the play would else be over—the killing allies Hamletfor a brief moment with the figure of Fortinbras, whose “unim-proved mettle hot and full” (1.1.95) leads him to violent action,heedless of the consequences, in order to recover his father’s lostlands.20 If to remember a father who has been killed is to sweepthoughtlessly to revenge—as we later see Laertes also try to do—then Hamlet’s eruption of murderous rage is a fine instance offilial memory. The rash and bloody sword thrust through thearras—“How now, a rat? Dead for a ducat, dead” (3.4.23)—wouldseem to signal his complete absorption in the urgent task of fulfill-ing his father’s ghostly command. But the exchange that directlyfollows calls that absorption and the nature of remembrance intoquestion.

Hamlet begins, to be sure, by dwelling lovingly on his father’spicture. “See what a grace was seated on this brow,” he tells hismother,

Hyperion’s curls, the front of Jove himself,An eye like Mars, to threaten or command,A station like the herald MercuryNew lighted on a heaven-kissing hill;A combination and a form indeedWhere every god did seem to set his sealTo give the world assurance of a man.This was your husband.

(3.4.54–62)


Pious remembrance might very well take the form of such intenseidealization. But there is something oddly unconvincing about thisperfervid eulogy: the metamorphosis of a particular man into apainted combination of classical deities might alternatively beviewed as a characteristic way of forgetting. More telling, perhaps,Hamlet’s meditation on his father’s picture is only the rhetoricalprelude to an elaborate, nauseated vision of his mother’s sexualintimacies with her new husband:

Nay, but to liveIn the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,Stewed in corruption, honeying and making loveOver the nasty sty.

(3.4.81–84)

Even more than his doubts about the origin of the Ghost, this ob-sessive, fascinated loathing seems to stand between Hamlet andfull remembrance, or so at least the Ghost’s sudden appearance inthe closet suggests.

That appearance interrupts Hamlet in themidst of an ungovern-able rant against his uncle:

HAMLET. A murderer and a villain,A slave that is not twenti’th part the titheOf your precedent lord, a vice of kings,A cutpurse of the empire and the rule,That from the shelf the precious diadem stoleAnd put it in his pocket—

QUEEN GERTRUDE. No more.HAMLET. A king of shreds and patches—Enter GHOST

(3.4.86–93)

According to a stage direction found only in the First Quarto, theGhost appears now clad not in his complete armor—and not withthe precious diadem and other symbols of his kingship—but in hisnightgown. He is, in this staging, a figure not of the battlementsnor of the throne room, but of the closet or the bedroom. The


detail of the nightgown, adopted by most editors of the play, wouldcorrespond not only to the intimacy of the setting of this particularscene but also to the fantasies on which Hamlet’s mind queasilydwells. Perhaps, too, for an audience that still recalled the old tales,the transformation from armor to nightgown would lightly echothose multiple hauntings in which spirits from Purgatory displayedtheir progressive purification by a gradual whitening of their robes.But, however much Hamlet is now persuaded that he has encoun-tered an “honest ghost,” he does not imagine that this visitation isbenign, or that the Ghost has come to demonstrate spiritual prog-ress or to request prayers.

Hamlet’s response is a confused succession of terror, guilt, andpity, each passion cutting across what he has barely been ableto articulate. At first, deeply alarmed, he prays for supernaturalprotection:

Save me and hover o’er me with your wings,You heavenly guards!

(3.4.94–95)

The prayer—in a reiterated first person that does not include Ger-trude—seems to indicate that Hamlet instinctively senses that theapparition is for him alone and that he is personally menaced byit, as by a demonic spirit.21 But then almost in the same breath, hegoes on to address the Ghost as a “gracious figure” and to expressa sense of guilt. “Do you not come your tardy son to chide?” Whatcan this question, asked by one who has only a moment beforekilled the man he thought was his uncle, possibly mean? Why doeshe intuit that his father’s spirit has come to chide him for tardiness,as one who “lapsed in time and passion, lets go by / Th’importantacting of your dread command?” (3.4.98–99). “Lapsed in time andpassion” is an ambiguous phrase, poised between the reproach ofcoolness and the reproach of excess. Perhaps Hamlet himself, wildwith fear and guilt, trembling in the presence of his mother, hisfather’s spirit, and the corpse of the man he has just murdered,does not know whether it is for too little passion or too much thathe deserves reproach. He knows that he has failed to fulfill the


“dread command” that he has undertaken to place at the very cen-ter of his being—“Remember me”—and it is this command thatthe Ghost’s response recalls:

Do not forget. This visitationIs but to whet thy almost blunted purpose.

(3.4.100–101)

“Do not forget”: the Ghost’s return is a reminder, an injunctionto sharpen what has become dull. Polonius’s bleeding body wouldseem ample evidence that Hamlet’s purpose was hardly blunted,but perhaps remembrance and revenge are not as perfectly coinci-dent as either the prince or the Ghost had thought. The Ghost’sapparition in the closet is strangely suffused with tenderness, pity,and love as well as fear and guilt. “Look you how pale he glares,”Hamlet says to his astonished, uncomprehending mother; “Hisform and cause conjoined, preaching to stones, / Would makethem capable” (3.4.116–18). Capable of what? Not of hurting, forstones are already capable of that, but of feeling, melting, weeping.Such, at least, is the implication of Hamlet’s plea that the Ghostnot look upon him,

Lest with this piteous action you convertMy stern effects.

(3.4.119–20)

We are closer to tears at this moment than to blood, closer to TheGast of Gy than to Seneca. To be sure, this ghost has appeared notto his wife but to the son from whom he demands vengeance. Yetwhat we see—what Hamlet sees not only here but also, in his imagi-nation, again and again—is a gesture of spousal tenderness andsolicitude:

But look, amazement on thy mother sits.O, step between her and her fighting soul.Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works.Speak to her, Hamlet.

(3.4.102–5)


What is it that Hamlet is supposed to remember? What does itmean to keep his memory from becoming dull? How is he to fulfillthe command, “Remember me”?

In The Gast of Gy the tangle of terror, guilt, grief, love, and, aboveall, remembrance—“Think on me”—is eventually resolved into aseries of ritual actions: three hundred masses, one hundred dedi-cated to the Trinity or the Holy Spirit, one hundred to the Virgin,fifty to Saint Peter, and fifty requiemmasses. InHamlet the Senecanrevenge plot seems to rise up from the twisted ruins of the purgato-rial system, but in what sense can it actually occupy the same place?Sticking a sword into someone’s body turns out to be a very trickyway of remembering the dead. The closet scene is the last timethat Hamlet—or the audience—sees the spirit of his father. It hasalready in some sense started to vanish. In the first act, though itspoke only to Hamlet, the Ghost was seen by Horatio, Marcellus,and Barnardo; now Hamlet seems to his mother to be bending his“eye on vacancy” and talking to “th’incorporal air” (3.4.108–9).Despite Hamlet’s urgent entreaties, Gertrude sees and hears noth-ing or, rather, more devastatingly, she sees and hears what exists:

HAMLET. Do you see nothing there?QUEEN GERTRUDE. Nothing at all, yet all that is I see.HAMLET. Nor did you nothing hear?QUEEN GERTRUDE. No, nothing but ourselves.

(3.4.122–24)

There is something almost frantic about Hamlet’s desire to havehis mother see what he sees, as if he senses that his own memorytraces are at stake:

Why, look you there. Look how it steals away.My father, in his habit as he lived.Look where he goes even now out at the portal.

(3.4.125–27)

The nineteenth-century editors who were uneasy about “stealsaway,” proposing without any evidence that Shakespeare must have


written “stalks,” were in their way sensitively registering the inglori-ous fading of remembrance.22

The Ghost not only vanishes from view here, never to return,but he also almost vanishes from speech. Hamlet, to be sure, re-proaches himself one further time—in a soliloquy dropped fromthe Folio version of the play—for “[b]estial oblivion, or some cra-ven scruple / Of thinking too precisely on th’event” (4.4.9.30–31)that has kept him from acting. Fortinbras and his army march offto do battle “even for an eggshell,” Hamlet bitterly observes;

How stand I, then,That have a father killed, a mother stained,Excitements of my reason and my blood,And let all sleep.

(4.4.9.46–49).

Somewhat later, there is a similar enumeration of his wrongs, witha small but telling difference: Claudius, Hamlet tells Horatio, “hathkilled my king and whored my mother” (5.2.65). Not “my father”but “my king”: here, as through the whole length of the play follow-ing the Ghost’s final apparition, the remembrance of the dead hasbecome depersonalized. In Hamlet’s speeches, there are no moremelancholy broodings on his father’s nobility or manly virtue, nomore loving descriptions of his appearance, no more tortured rec-ollections of the love he bore for his mother. When for the lasttime the prince invokes his father as father, it is in a context thatoddly conjoins memory—an impression stamped in wax— and bu-reaucracy: “I had,” Hamlet tells Horatio, in explaining how he senthis old school friends to their deaths, “my father’s signet in mypurse” (5.2.50). And for the others the former king has simplybecome a point of reference, a marker of time. “How long hastthou been a grave-maker?” the prince asks one of the gravediggers;“Of all the days i’th’year,” the man replies, “I came to’t that daythat our last King Hamlet o’ercame Fortinbras” (5.1.130–33). Thisis what it means to be well and truly buried.

Even at the play’s close, where we might most expect it, thereis no restrospect, no final glance back at the warrior king whose


treacherous murder has set the destructive train of events in mo-tion. In the confused, violent melee at the play’s close, Hamletdoes not even declare to the horrified bystanders the meaning ofhis actions. “The King, the King’s to blame” (5.2.263), gasps thedying Laertes, but the blame of which he speaks is the poisoningof the drink that has killed Gertrude, and of the sword that will ina matter of moments kill both Hamlet and himself. Laertes will diewithout any knowledge of Claudius’s crime against old Hamlet.When the dying prince stabs his “murd’rous” uncle with the poi-soned sword and forces him to swallow the remaining potion, noone but Horatio could possibly think that the murder in questionis that of the former king. The courtiers’ shouts of “Treason, trea-son!” must refer to the killing of the elected king, Claudius, orperhaps to the poisoning of the queen and the prince; not, in anycase, to what they must believe to have been the accidental death ofhis predecessor. When the prince finishes off Claudius, he himselfthinks not of his father’s spirit in the afterlife but of his mother’s:

Drink off this potion. Is thy union here?Follow my mother.

(5.2.268–69)

At the moment that his command is finally fulfilled, old Hamlethas in effect been forgotten.

Remembering the dead, then, is vastly more complex, contra-dictory, and difficult than it had first seemed.23 The tragedy endswithout a last reckoning, a moment, however brief, in which therevenger—agent of what Francis Bacon calls “wild justice”24—dis-closes the nature of the crime that he has now punished. Hamletbegins to make such a disclosure—the audience is deliberately ledto expect that he is about to do so and hence about to speak onelast time about his father—but he is carried off, as if to a prison,without being able to deliver his speech:

You that look pale and tremble at this chance,That are but mutes or audience to this act,Had I but time—as this fell sergeant Death


Is strict in his arrest—O, I could tell you—But let it be.

(5.2.276–80)

“Let it be” and “the rest is silence” form between them the father’srequiem, as well as the son’s.

There are, however, two important qualifications to this climac-tic oblivion. First, Hamlet adjures Horatio, poised amidst the gen-eral carnage to commit suicide, to stay alive:

If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,Absent thee from felicity a while,And in this harsh world draw thy breath in painTo tell my story.

(5.2.288–91)

Through Horatio Hamlet’s story will live on, and insofar as thatstory involves the remembrance of his father, so, too, the memoryof the Ghost will survive in narrative. But Horatio, of course, neverhimself hears the Ghost speak, and even if we imagine that Hamlethas related what he was told, the friend’s narrative cannot and willnot be an intimate, personal act of remembering the beloved fa-ther. There is, however, a second way in which the Ghost may besaid to be present at the end of the play, and that is inside of hisson. When Hamlet first receives his father’s dread command, herepeats it to himself, in his own voice, as if he wants to ventriloquizethe Ghost’s words by making them his “word”:

Now to my word:It is “Adieu, adieu, remember me”.I have sworn’t.

(1.5.111–13)25

At the close Hamlet does not speak of his father, but he twice bidsfarewell to Horatio in a strange phrase: “I am dead” (5.2.275, 280).The phrase simply picks up on what Laertes has told him—“Ham-let, thou art slain” (5.2.256)—and elsewhere in his final speechHamlet speaks of himself not as a person who is already dead butas one who is dying: “O, I die. . . . I cannot live. . . . He has my dying


voice. . . . O, O, O, O!” (5.2.294–301). But, in the context of theplay as a whole, the reiterated expression “I am dead” has an oddresonance: these are words that are most appropriately spoken bya ghost. It is as if the spirit of Hamlet’s father has not disappeared;it has been incorporated by his son.

DARK HINTS

“When the ghost has vanished,” says Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, inwhat is probably the most influential of all readings of Hamlet,“what do we see standing before us? A young hero thirsting forrevenge? A prince by birth, happy to be charged with unseatingthe usurper of his throne? Not at all!” The tragedy is more inward:“A fine, pure, noble and highly moral person, but devoid of thatemotional strength that characterizes a hero, goes to pieces be-neath a burden that it can neither support nor cast off.”26 Genera-tions of critics have agreed, responding in effect to the startlingShakespearean shift from vengeance to remembrance. But whatmotivated this unprecedented shift? Where did it come from?Howdid it connect successfully with a popular London audience in1601? And why, more specifically, is the injunction to rememberspoken by a ghost? The overwhelming emphasis on the psychologi-cal dimension, crowned by psychoanalytical readings of the play inthe twentieth century, has the odd effect of eliminating the Ghostas ghost, turning it into the prince’s traumatic memory or, alterna-tively, into a conventional piece of dispensable stage machinery.(“When the ghost has vanished,” Goethe’s account tellingly be-gins.) But if we do not let the Ghost vanish altogether, we can per-haps begin to answer these questions, by recognizing that the psy-chological in Shakespeare’s tragedy is constructed almost entirelyout of the theological, and specifically out of the issue of remem-brance that, as we have seen, lay at the heart of the crucial early-sixteenth-century debate about Purgatory.

More’s souls are in a panic that they will be forgotten, erased by“slothful oblivion.” They are heartsick that they will fade from theminds of the living, that their wives will remarry, that their childrenwill mention them only, if at all, “so coldly and with so dull af-


fection that it lies but in the lips, and comes not near the heart”(149). They are harrowed above all by the fear that their sufferingswill cease even to be credited, that their prison house will be dis-missed as a “fantastic fable,” and that their very existence, in itshorrible, prolonged pain, will be doubted. It is this fear that seemsto shape Shakespeare’s depiction of the Ghost and of Hamlet’sresponse.

The Ghost makes clear to Hamlet that he is in what ThomasWhite’s early-seventeenth-century text called “the middle state ofsouls,”27 not damned for eternity but forced to suffer torments ina “prison-house” designed to purge him of the crimes he had com-mitted in his life:

I am thy father’s spirit,Doomed for a certain term to walk the night,And for the day confined to fast in firesTill the foul crimes done in my days of natureAre burnt and purged away.

(1.5.9–13)

“For a certain term”—the bland phrase, which looks at first asthough it serves only to fill out the syllables of a line of blank verse,is in fact significant, since it helps to set up the theological claimof the word “purged.”28 In a mid-eleventh-century report onmoansthat had been heard to rise out of the crater of Stromboli, Jotsualdexplained that the souls of sinners were being tortured there adtempus statutum, for a certain term.29 “In purgatory my soul hathbeen / a thousand years in woe and teen,” the “Imperator Salvatus”says in the Chester mystery play The Last Judgment (ca. 1475);

As hard pains, I dare well say,in purgatory are night and dayas are in hell, save by one way—that one shall have an end.30

In church teachings, the excruciating pains of Purgatory and ofHell were, as we have seen, identical; the only difference was thatthe former were only for a certain term.


That one difference, of course, was crucial, but the CatholicChurch laid a heavy emphasis upon the horrors of purgatorial tor-ments, so that the faithful would be as anxious as possible to reducethe term they would have to endure. The intensity of the anguishis brilliantly represented in the greatest of English morality plays,Everyman (ca. 1495), where God sends his agent Death to demandof the hero “a sure reckoning / Without delay or any tarrying.”31

Everyman frantically begs for time, for his “book of reckoning” isnot ready, but Death will grant him only the briefest of respites.Still, the interval is enough for the penitent to begin to scourgehimself: “Take this, body, for the sin of the flesh!” (613). The gro-tesque spectacle of a dying man scourging himself makes senseonly in the context of a desperate, last-minute attempt to alter the“reckoning” by substituting penitential pain in this life for the farmore terrible pain that lies ahead. “Now of penance I will wade thewater clear,” declares Everyman, intensifying his blows, “To save mefrom purgatory, that sharp fire” (618–19).

Everyman has thus narrowly escaped one of the worst medievalnightmares, a sudden death.32 This nightmare, of course, is thefate that befalls Hamlet’s father: the horror is not only the fact ofhis murder, at the hands of his treacherous brother, but also theprecise circumstances of that murder, in his sleep, comfortable andsecure. Contemplating killing Claudius at prayer, Hamlet remem-bers that Claudius took his father “grossly, full of bread, / Withall his crimes broad blown, as flush as May” (3.3.80–81). Hamletcontinues with lines that are perfectly orthodox, from a theologicalpoint of view, but extremely strange in the wake of what he haswitnessed and heard:

And how his audit stands, who knows save heaven?But in our circumstance and course of thought’Tis heavy with him.

(3.4.82–84)

The phrase “circumstance and course of thought” is a hendiadys,or nearly so: it means something like circumstantial or indirectcourse of thought. But Hamlet has precisely had a more directtestimony, which he has professed, only a minute before, to credit


absolutely: “I’ll take the Ghost’s word for a thousand pound”(3.2.263–64). That is, his father’s ghost has told him quite explic-itly how his audit stands, but once again Hamlet has “forgotten,”as he earlier forgot that a traveler has in fact returned from thebourns of the death’s undiscovered country.

Having just glanced indirectly at the question of where his fatherresides in the afterlife, and having avoided directly naming Purga-tory, Hamlet goes on to ask himself, with regard to murdering hisuncle, “[A]m I then revenged / To take him in the purging of hissoul, / When he is fit and seasoned for his passage?” (3.4.84–86).The word “purging” is striking here, since it links prayer in thisworld (and the preparation or seasoning of a soul for the “passage”to the other world) to the purgation that may or may not follow.Similarly, a few minutes earlier, in response to Guildenstern’s say-ing that the king is “distempered” (a word that recurs in Hamlet)with “choler,” Hamlet jokes, “Your wisdom should show itself morericher to signify this to his doctor, for for me to put him to hispurgation would perhaps plunge him into far more choler”(3.2.279–81). Here purgation has a meaning in humoral medi-cine, but the joke is a deep one, since for Hamlet to put the king tohis purgation would mean to kill him, and that would, in Hamlet’saccount, plunge him into choler, that is, into the rage of infernalpunishment and torture.

These strange, angry jests seem like a series of anxious, displacedreflections on the middle state in which the Ghost is condemnedto suffer as a result of being taken “full of bread.” Old Hamlet’scondition is a grievous one—the term of his sufferings or theirintensity vastly increased—because of the way he was dispatched,unprepared for death:

Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,Unhouseled, dis-appointed, unaneled,No reck’ning made, but sent to my accountWith all my imperfections on my head.O horrible, O horrible, most horrible!

(1.5.76–80)


That he can speak of “imperfections” presumably means that hissins were not mortal; after all, he will eventually burn and purgeaway his crimes. But his inability to make a proper reckoning andhis failure to receive the Catholic last rites weigh heavily againsthim.33

When he first encounters the apparition, Hamlet envisages onlytwo possibilities for the Ghost’s origin:

Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned,Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,Be thy intents wicked or charitable,Thou com’st in such a questionable shapeThat I will speak to thee.

(1.4.21–25)

Nothing Hamlet says in the wake of his fateful exchange with hisfather’s spirit explicitly acknowledges a third possibility, a middlestate between Heaven and Hell, a place within the earth wheresouls are purged. But “there are more things in heaven and earth,Horatio,” he tells his Wittenberg friend, as the Ghost moves rest-lessly beneath the stage, “Than are dreamt of in our philosophy”(1.5.169–69). And a moment later, hearing the Ghost’s voice onceagain, he addresses it directly in words that would have been utterlyfamiliar to a Catholic and deeply suspect to a Protestant: “Rest,rest, perturbed spirit” (1.5.183).34

There is, moreover, something suspect (or at least strange), asscholars have long noted, about the precise terms of Hamlet’s re-sponse to Horatio’s remark, “There’s no offense, my lord”:

Yes, by Saint Patrick, but there is, Horatio,And much offence, too. Touching this vision here,It is an honest ghost, that let me tell you.

(1.5.139–42)

The assertion that the Ghost is “honest” seems to mark Hamlet’sacceptance of its claim that it has come from a place of purgation,and that acceptance may in turn be marked by the invocation—unique in Shakespeare’s works—of Saint Patrick, the patron saint


of Purgatory. By the eighteenth century Warburton thought theinvocation of Patrick must have been made “at random,”35 but aspecific association with Purgatory would have probably seemedobvious to a late-sixteenth-century audience. “I come not from Tro-phonius care [sic], for then I should be loathed,” declares a charac-ter in John Grange’s The Golden Aphroditis (1577), “[n]or fromS. Patrick’s purgatory.”36 In the first chapter, we examined a num-ber of these allusions, all of which make clear the strong associa-tion between Saint Patrick and Purgatory, along with the associa-tion, to which we will return, between Purgatory and fiction.

To the Saint Patrick allusion in Hamlet, whose association withPurgatory was remarked as early as the 1860s by the learned Ger-man philologist Benno Tschischwitz, we can add another, a fewlines further on, that has not, to my knowledge, been noted. WhenHamlet adjures his friends to take an oath that they will not revealwhat they have seen, the Ghost, from under the stage, cries“Swear.” When they shift ground to a new position, the Ghost onceagain cries out beneath them, and Hamlet asks, “Hic et ubique?”(1.5.158). The Latin tag here has never been adequately ex-plained.37 The words obviously refer to restless movement, a cer-tain placelessness, comparable in Othello to Roderigo’s descrip-tion of Othello as “an extravagant and wheeling stranger / Ofhere and everywhere” (1.1.137–38). The use of Latin—besidessuggesting that Hamlet is, like his friend Horatio, something ofa scholar—may also convey a theological resonance, one evi-dently in Shakespeare’s mind at the time that he wrote Hamlet.In Twelfth Night, a play of the same year, Sebastian, baffled by theappearance of his double, declares that there cannot be “that deityin my nature / Of here and everywhere” (5.1.220–21). The wordsrefer in jest to the divine power to violate the laws of physics, apower that became an issue in the Reformation in a dispute overthe Lutheran doctrine of Christ’s Ubiquity. If this resonance ispresent in Hamlet, as it well may be, the prince’s jest is deepenedby a disquieting association of his father’s ghost with the omnipres-ence of God.

But I believe that there is a further theological resonance tothese words, specifically relevant to Purgatory. Traditional Catholic


ritual in England included a prayer, at which we briefly glanced inthe first chapter, to be recited for the dead who had been laid torest in the churchyard. God’s mercy and forgiveness of sin arebegged on behalf of all of those souls here and everywhere (hic etubique) who rest in Christ.38 The point is not only that such pleasfor the dead make use of the key phrase hic et ubique but also thatthey are specifically connected to a belief in Purgatory. In The Cath-olic Doctrine of the Church of England (1607), the Protestant ThomasRogers, ridiculing this connection, quotes the papal indulgencefrom the Sarum Horae Beatissimae Virginis Mariae: “Pope John theTwelfth hath granted to all persons, which, going through thechurchyard, do say the prayer following, so many years of pardonsas there have been bodies buried since it was a churchyard.”39 Theprayer begins “Avete, omnes animae fideles, quarum corpora hicet ubique requiescunt in pulvere” (“Hail all faithful souls, whosebodies here and everywhere do rest in the dust”). In the contextof the Ghost’s claim that he is being purged, and in the context,too, of Hamlet’s invocation of Saint Patrick, the words hic et ubique,addressed to the spirit who seems to be moving beneath the earth,seem to be an acknowledgment of the place where his father’sspirit is imprisoned.

There is a famous problem with all of these heavy hints that theGhost is in or has come from Purgatory: by 1563, almost forty yearsbefore Shakespeare’s Hamlet was written, the Church of Englandhad explicitly rejected the Roman Catholic conception of Purga-tory and the practices that had been developed around it. Thetwenty-second of the Thirty-Nine Articles declares that “[t]he Rom-ish doctrine concerning Purgatory, Pardons, Worshipping, and Ad-oration, as well of Images as of Reliques, and also invocation ofSaints, is a fond thing, vainly invented, and grounded upon nowarranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the word of God.”40

This fact alone would not necessarily have invalidated allusions toPurgatory: there were many people who clung to the old beliefs,despite the official position, and Elizabethan audiences were inany case perfectly capable of imaginatively entering into alien be-lief systems.41 Hence the spectators could watch the Lupercalia inJulius Caesar or Lear’s solemn invocation of Hecate, and Shake-


speare’s plays frequently (and not unsympathetically) representthe monks and friars from the outlawed Catholic orders. But thetheater, like the press, was censored, and, though the censors wereoften slipshod in some respects, they were acutely sensitive to con-troversial political and doctrinal questions. It was, as we saw in thelast chapter, possible in the Elizabethan theater to represent theafterlife in many different ways, and it was possible (indeed, per-fectly orthodox) for Shakespeare to absorb some of the imageryof Purgatory into the representation of ordinary life. But it wouldhave been highly risky to represent in a favorable light any specifi-cally Roman Catholic doctrines or practices, just as it would havebeen virtually impossible to praise the pope.

A playwright could ridicule Purgatory, as Marlowe does in DoctorFaustus: when the invisible Faustus snatches food and drink awayfrom the pope, the baffled archbishop of Rheims speculates thatit may “be some ghost crept out of purgatory and now is comeunto your holiness for his pardon.”42 So, too, in a pamphlet writtenabout 1590, Tarlton’s News Out of Purgatory, the anonymous authorpretends that he left the theater, in order to avoid the huge crowd,walked in the nearby fields, and, falling asleep under a tree, wasastonished to be approached by the ghost of the popular Elizabe-than clown, Richard Tarlton. “Ghost thou art none,” he told Tarl-ton, “but a very devil, for the souls of them which are departed, ifthe sacred principles of theology be true, never return into theworld again till the general resurrection.” But Tarlton saucily re-plied that he resided not in Heaven or Hell but in “a third placethat all our great grandmothers have talked of.” “What, sir,” theclown continued, “are we wiser then all our forefathers? and theynot only feared that place in life, but found it after their death: orelse was there much land and annual pensions given in vain tomorrow-mass priests for dirges, trentals, and such like decretals ofdevotion.”43 As this andmany similar moments in Tudor and Stuarttexts bear witness, belief in Purgatory could be represented as a slyjest, a confidence trick, a mistake, or what Knevet, in a poem-quoted in chapter 2, calls “a fable or a story, / A place of fancy.”But it could not be represented as a frightening reality. Hamletcomes closer to doing so than any other play of this period. But


Shakespeare, with his remarkable gift for knowing exactly how farhe could go without getting into serious trouble, still only uses anetwork of allusions: “for a certain term,” “burned and purgedaway,” “Yes, by Saint Patrick,” “hic et ubique.”

Moreover, even were these allusions less cautiously equivocal,there remains a second famous problem: souls in Purgatory weresaved. The fact that old Hamlet died suddenly and hence withouttime for last rites—“unhouseled, dis-appointed, unaneled”—lefthim with a heavy burden of earthly sins that had painfully to beburned away after death, but he could not possibly commit newsins. The trouble is that Purgatory, along with theological languageof communion (houseling), deathbed confession (appointment),and anointing (aneling), while compatible with a Christian (and,specifically, a Catholic) call for remembrance, is utterly incompati-ble with a Senecan call for vengeance.44 Such a call for ven-geance—and Hamlet understands that it is premeditated murder,not due process, that is demanded of him—could come only fromthe place in the afterlife where Seneca’s ghosts reside: Hell.

UNCERTAINTY AND INTERROGATION

It would be quite possible for an audience not to notice this prob-lem at all—after all, this is a play, not a theological tract, and thereare many comparable contradictions that are simply ignoredthroughout Shakespeare and Elizabethan drama—were it not forthe fact that Hamlet notices it and broods about it. Even beforethe Ghost has uttered a syllable, Hamlet anticipates the problemand articulates the key question that the discretio spirituum wasmeant to address.

Angels and ministers of grace defend us!Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned,Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,Be thy intents wicked or charitable,Thou com’st in such a questionable shapeThat I will speak to thee.

(1.4.20–25)


The initial injunction functions like the prophylactic prayers thatprecede Jean Gobi’s encounter with the ghost, and the paired op-tions that follow make clear that Hamlet goes into the encounterfully understanding the dangerous ambiguity that characterizedall spectral returns. But there is an odd sense in which Hamletleaps over the questions that were traditionally asked of “question-able” apparitions. This is precisely not the beginning of a clericalinterrogation: in the almost unbearable intensity of the moment,he acknowledges the ambiguity only to brush it aside as irrelevant.“I’ll call thee Hamlet,” he declares impetuously, before the Ghosthas named himself, “King, father, royal Dane” (1.4.25–26).

The desperate impatience that Hamlet expresses is to know whythe Ghost has returned, not whence it has returned. Indeed, headdresses the apparition not as a spirit at all but as a “dead corpse”that has burst out from its tomb:

Let me not burst in ignorance, but tellWhy thy canonized bones, hearsed in death,Have burst their cerements, why the sepulchreWherein we saw thee quietly enurnedHath oped his ponderous and marble jawsTo cast thee up again.

(1.4.27–32)

This is not an image of Jonah miraculously cast up from the bellyof the fish; rather, it is as if Hamlet pictures his father vomitedforth, like something undigested, from one of those horriblemouths that artists painted to represent Hell or Purgatory. Hamlethad been deeply mourning his father, seeking him, as his mothersaid, in the dust. But this vision of his father out of the grave,weirdly intact and clad in armor, is hideous. Instead of “cerements”(that is, grave clothes), the First Quarto reading is “ceremonies.”The alternative calls attention to something in any case insistentlypresent in the lines: a sense of shattered ritual, a violation of whatit means for a corpse to be “canonized,” “hearsed,” quietly laid torest in its sepulchre. The violation, Hamlet thinks, must have ameaning, and, horribly shaken “with thoughts beyond the reachesof our souls” (1.4.37), he is willing to risk his life to find out whatthe meaning is.


It is only when he has discovered this meaning, when he hasreceived the Ghost’s charge to revenge and to remember, thatHamlet returns to the question of the Ghost’s status.

The spirit that I have seenMay be the devil, and the devil hath powerT’assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps,Out of my weakness and my melancholy—As he is very potent with such spirits—Abuses me to damn me.

(2.2.575–80).45

The test he devises to establish the veracity of the Ghost’s accusa-tion—“The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience ofthe King” (2.2.581–82)—seems to satisfy Hamlet, but it notori-ously leaves the question of the Ghost’s origin unanswered.

My intention here is not to rehearse a long series of debates byEleanor Prosser, Christopher Devlin, Miriam Joseph, Peter Mil-ward, Roy Battenhouse, and others whose intricate arguments, forme at least, are not completely evacuated by the fact that they arealmost certainly doomed to inconclusiveness.46 In the ingeniousattempt to determine whether the apparition is “Catholic” or“Protestant,” whether it is a spirit of health or a goblin damned,whether it comes from Purgatory or from Hell—as if these werequestions that could be decisively answered if only we were some-how clever enough—the many players in the long-standing criticalgame have usefully called attention to the bewildering array ofhints that the play generates.47 Perhaps most striking is simply howmuch evidence on all sides there is in the play, and not only fromthose scenes in which the status of the Ghost is being directly dis-cussed. Hence, for example, Ophelia tells her father that thedistracted Hamlet appeared to her in her chamber

with a look so piteous in purportAs if he had been loosed out of hellTo speak of horrors. . . .

(2.1.83–85)

Spirits loosed out of Hell do not normally have “piteous” looks;it is as if Ophelia had begun by thinking of purgatorial suffering


and then shifted in midstream to a figure from a pagan or Chris-tian Hell.

The issue is not, I think, simply random inconsistency. There is,rather, a pervasive pattern, a deliberate forcing together of radi-cally incompatible accounts of almost everything that matters inHamlet. Is Hamlet mad or only feigning madness? Does he delayin the pursuit of revenge or only berate himself for delaying? IsGertrude innocent or was she complicit in the murder of her hus-band? Is the strange account of the old king’s murder accurate ordistorted? Does the Ghost come from Purgatory or from Hell?—for many generations now audiences and readers have risen to thechallenge and found that each of the questions may be powerfullyand convincingly answered on both sides. What is at stake is morethan a multiplicity of answers. The opposing positions challengeeach other, clashing and sending shock waves through the play.In terms of the particular issues with which this book has beenconcerned, a young man from Wittenberg, with a distinctly Protes-tant temperament, is haunted by a distinctly Catholic ghost.

We have already encountered comic versions of such a hauntingin Tarlton’s News Out of Purgatory and The Puritan: or, the Widow ofWatling Street. But Shakespeare was virtually unique in understand-ing and giving dramatic expression to its tragic potential. What Ihave called Hamlet’s Protestant temperament is something morethan his suspicion that the Ghost may be a devil—a suspicion, afterall, that a Catholic could have shared. His sensibility appears moresuggestively in a strange exchange that occurs after Hamlet hasmurdered the eavesdropping Polonius. “Now, Hamlet, where’sPolonius?” Claudius asks. “At supper.” “At supper? Where?” “Notwhere he eats,” Hamlet replies, “but where a is eaten” (4.3.17–20). The significance of these words extends beyond the cruel andcallous joke about Polonius; the supper where the host does noteat but is eaten is the Supper of the Lord. Protestant polemicistshad returned throughout the sixteenth century to the moment ofeating God’s Body; it was for them a way of mocking what theytook to be the crude materialism of the Catholic doctrine of tran-substantiation. Hence they dwelt with a violent gleefulness on thepersistence and what we might call the embarrassments of matter.


If God was actually bread, they tirelessly jested, it meant that Godcould be eaten by worms, flies, or mice, that the divine body coulddecay and rot, or that, passing through the intestines, it could betransformed into excrement.

If a comparable theological resonance in Hamlet’s weird jestseems implausible—for Polonius is a far cry from the body ofGod—the next lines make it sound again: “A certain convocationof politic worms are e’en at him. Your worm is your only emperorfor diet” (4.3.20–22). Scholars duly note the allusion to the Dietof Worms, where Luther’s doctrines were officially condemned bythe Holy Roman Emperor, but the question is what work the allu-sion is doing. Two answers have been proposed—showing thatHamlet was a student at Wittenberg and marking the earliest datefor the play’s events—but its principal function, I think, is to echoand reinforce the theological and, specifically, the Eucharistic sub-text, not only in the bitter jest that was just spoken but in the re-verse riddle that follows: “A man may fish with the worm that hatheat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.” “Whatdost thoumean by this?” Claudius asks, and Hamlet replies, “Noth-ing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the gutsof a beggar” (4.3.27–31).

Somewhere half-buried here is a death threat against theusurper-king—and Claudius understands perfectly well that the ra-pier thrust at the rat behind the arras had been aimed at himrather than Polonius—but the rage in Hamlet’s words reaches be-yond his immediate enemy to touch his father’s body, rotting inthe grave. And if these words are, as I am suggesting, a grotesquelymaterialist reimagining of the Eucharist, they would seem to touchhis father’s spirit as well and hence to protest against the ghostlytransmission of patriarchal memory and against the whole sacrifi-cial plot in which the son is fatally appointed to do his father’sbidding. But how is it possible to reconcile this apparently skepti-cal, secular protest with Hamlet’s obsessive quest to fulfill preciselythe task that the Ghost has set him?

The answer is that a skeptical, secular insistence on irreduciblecorporeality paradoxically originates in an attempt to save the Eu-charist from the taint of the body. It is only by ritually defiling the


Host, by imagining the sacrament passing through the belly of thebeast, by dwelling on the corruptibility of matter and its humiliat-ing susceptibility to the exigencies of the food chain that one canliberate the spirit. If Christ’s Glorified Body, or, rather, Christianfaith in that Body, is to be saved from material contamination, itmust be pried loose from the visible church, separated off fromthe grossly physical bread and wine, reserved entirely for the realmof the spirit. Mockery of the material leftover, the matter subjectto consumption and rot, is a way of insisting that Christ—single,whole, and beyond corruption—dwells in Heaven at the righthand of his Father. This is the logic of Protestant polemics againstthe Mass, and this, too, is the logic that seems to drive Hamlet.48

Even before he learned of his mother’s adultery and his father’smurder, Hamlet had been sickened by the “too too solid” (or “sal-lied” or “sullied”) flesh, flesh whose terrible weakness is strikinglyfigured by the recycling of leftovers: “Thrift, thrift, Horatio. Thefuneral bakedmeats / Did coldly furnish forth themarriage tables”(1.2.179–80). InHamlet’s bitter jest, food prepared for his father’sfuneral has been used for his mother’s marriage, a confoundingof categories that has stained both social rituals in the service ofthrift. At issue is not only, as G. R. Hibbard suggests, an aristocraticdisdain for a bourgeois prudential virtue,49 but a conception of thesacred as incompatible with a restricted economy, an economy ofcalculation and equivalence. Such calculation has led Gertrude tomarry Claudius, as if he were his brother’s equal: “My father’sbrother,” Hamlet protests, “but no more like my father / Than Ito Hercules” (1.2.152–53). Her remarriage, like the re-use of thefuneral baked meats, is a double defilement: it has sullied Ger-trude’s flesh and, since “[f]ather and mother is man and wife; manand wife is one flesh” (4.3.53–54), it has retroactively stained oldHamlet by identifying his noble spirit with the grossness of the“bloat King” (3.4.166). The source of the pollution, according tothe Ghost, is unbridled sexual appetite:

lust, though to a radiant angel linked,Will sate itself in a celestial bed,And prey on garbage.

(1.5.55–57)


The disgust provoked by the leftovers is here intensified by theimage of the person who, though sated, continues to eat and toeat garbage—not simply filth or refuse, but, literally, “entrails.”

The time is out of joint, and the spirit of the father has chargedhis son with setting it right. But the task becomes mired in theflesh that will not melt away, that cannot free itself from longingsfor mother and lover, that stubbornly persists and resists andblocks the realization of the father’s wishes. And the task is furthercomplicated by the father’s own entanglements in the flesh. Whenalive, old Hamlet was not exempt from the thousand naturalshocks that flesh is heir to, and even after death he carries abouthim a strange quasi-carnality, for he was taken “grossly, full ofbread, / With all his crimes broad blown, as flush as May” (3.3.80–81). “Full of bread”—the words distinguish between someone liv-ing in the midst of his ordinary life and someone who, anticipatingdeath, puts his spiritual house in order through fasting.

Hamlet is disgusted by the grossness whose emblem here is thebread in his father’s stomach, a grossness figured as well by drink-ing, sleeping, sexual intercourse, and above all perhaps by wom-an’s flesh. The play enacts and reenacts queasy rituals of defile-ment and revulsion, an obsession with a corporeality that reduceseverything to appetite and excretion. “We fat all creatures else tofat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and yourlean beggar is but variable service—two dishes, but to one table.That’s the end” (4.3.22–25). Here, as in the lines about the king’sprogress through the guts of a beggar, the revulsion is mingledwith a sense of drastic leveling, the collapse of order and distinc-tion into polymorphous, endlessly recycled materiality. Claudius,with his reechy kisses and paddling fingers, is a paddock, a bat, agib, and this unclean beast, like the priapic priest of Protestantpolemics, has poisoned the entire social and symbolic system.Hamlet’s response is not to attempt to shore it up but to drag italtogether into the writhing of maggots. Matter corrupts: “if youfind him not this month,” Hamlet says, finally telling Claudiuswhere to look for Polonius’s corpse, “you shall nose him as you goup the stairs into the lobby” (4.3.35–36).

The spirit can be healed only by refusing all compromise and byplunging the imagination unflinchingly into the rank corruption


of the ulcerous place. Such a conviction led the Reformers to dwellon the progress of the Host through the guts of a mouse, and acomparable conviction, born of intertwining theological and psy-chological obsessions, leads Hamlet to the clay pit and the decayedleftovers that the gravediggers bring to light. “How abhorred myimagination is,” Hamlet says, staring at the skull of Yorick; “Mygorge rises at it” (5.1.173–74). This is the primary and elementalnausea provoked by the vulnerability of matter, a nausea that re-duces language to a gagging sound that the Folio registers as “Pah.”This revulsion is not an end in itself; it is the spiritual preconditionof a liberated spirit that finds a special providence in the fall of asparrow, sacrificially fulfills the father’s design, and declares thatthe readiness is all.

BOUNDARY DISPUTES

But the problem is that the father’s design is vengeance; ven-geance, moreover, demanded by a spirit that seems to come fromthe place that was for Protestants a supreme emblem of the corrup-tion of the Catholic Church. What can be made of this? The pointsurely is not to settle issues that Shakespeare has clearly gone outof his way to unsettle or render ambiguous. I am concerned, rather,with the particular uses that the playwright made of the strugglebetween Simon Fish and Thomas More and its aftermath. Thoseuses are not necessarily direct. Two chantry acts—1545 (HenryVIII’s last Parliament) and 1547 (Edward VI’s first Parliament)—resolved that struggle by abolishing the whole elaborate Catholicintercessory system, with its chantries, lights, obits, anniversaries,confraternities, stipendiary priests, and the like, with which En-glish men and women had done suffrages for the sake of the deadin Purgatory and in anticipation of their own future condition asdead people.50 The brief reign of the Catholic Mary Tudor evi-dently did little to revive this system, and it is extremely difficult togauge the extent of residual belief in Purgatory among the greatmass of English men and women at the century’s end.51

In the funeral service in the first Edwardian prayer book (1549),the dead person was still directly addressed: the priest is instructed


to cast earth upon the corpse and to say, “I commend thy soul toGod the father almighty, and thy body to the ground, earth toearth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” In the 1552 revision, which waslater confirmed by Queen Elizabeth and used throughout Shake-speare’s lifetime, the words have changed decisively. The dead per-son can no longer be addressed. Instead, the priest says to thebystanders around the grave, “We therefore commit his body tothe ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”52 These arethe words that anyone in late-sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuryEngland would have heard. Yet the continued outpouring of po-lemical literature, reviving the old arguments of Fish and Moreand rehearsing them again and again throughout the reigns ofElizabeth and James, suggests that the boundary between the livingand the dead was not so decisively closed.

The security of the boundary was inevitably called into questionby the appearance of ghosts. The apparition inHamlet immediatelytriggers at least some elements of the traditional rituals in responseto hauntings that we have discussed. Hence, for example, thesoldiers Marcellus and Barnardo have recourse to an expert:“Thou art a scholar—speak to it, Horatio. . . . Question it, Horatio”(1.1.40, 43). Horatio, like the prior confronting the ghost of Gy,duly initiates a series of questions that follow the logic of the dis-cretio spirituum:

What art thou that usurp’st this time of night,Together with that fair and warlike formIn which the majesty of buried DenmarkDid sometimes march? By heaven, I charge thee speak.

(1.1.44–47)53

And Hamlet similarly echoes the formal cross-examination’s litanyof Cur? Causas? Remedium?: “Say, why is this? Wherefore? Whatshould we do?” (1.4.38).

These rituals were, as Schmitt and others have argued, part of asustained attempt to tame death, to contain it in the ceremoniesof the church and the churchyard. We might note the prominentplace in Hamlet given to the ritualization of the funeral service,both in the reference to the sepulchre in which the corpse of old


Hamlet was “enurned” and still more in Ophelia’s burial service,marked by Laertes’ reiterated question, “What ceremony else?” Butthe priest’s response makes clear that, in his view, the holy space ofthe cemetery would be violated by the full rites that Laertes de-mands, and is in danger of pollution even from the maimed ritesthat he and his fellow priests are being forced to perform:

Her obsequies have been as far enlargedAs we have warrantise. Her death was doubtful,And but that great command o’ersways the orderShe should in ground unsanctified have lodgedTill the last trumpet. For charitable prayers,Shards, flints, and pebbles should be thrown on her,Yet here she is allowed her virgin rites,Her maiden strewments, and the bringing homeOf bell and burial.

(5.1.208–16)

The proper funeral that is being invoked here (and partially de-nied to Ophelia) seems far closer to the full Catholic ritual of inter-ment, with the ringing of bells and attendant ceremonies, than tothe simple burial for which zealous Protestants were calling.54 Andit is clear from this and the subsequent exchange that what is atstake is not only the communal social judgment upon Ophelia,suspected of suicide, but also the communal ritual assistance givento the dead by the living—that is, the requiem masses and other“charitable prayers” designed to shorten the soul’s purgatorial suf-fering and hasten its ascent to Heaven. “God ’a’ mercy on his soul,”the mad Ophelia had prayed for her own murdered father, “Andof all Christian souls, I pray God” (4.5.194–95)

“Must there no more be done?” Laertes insistently asks, to whichthe priest responds with a harsh refusal:

No more be done.We should profane the service of the deadTo sing sage requiem and such rest to herAs to peace-parted souls.

(5.1.217–21)


“Lay her i’ th’ earth,” Laertes orders, glancing both at the chargeof pollution and at the trajectory of his sister’s soul:

And from her fair and unpolluted fleshMay violets spring. I tell thee, churlish priest,A minist’ring angel shall my sister beWhen thou liest howling.

(5.1.221–25)55

This dispute over Ophelia’s funeral ceremony is an instance of anoverarching phenomenon in Hamlet: the disruption or poisoningof virtually all rituals for managing grief, allaying personal and col-lective anxiety, and restoring order.

The source of this poisoning in the play is Claudius, who usurpsnot only the kingship but also the language of Protestant mourning.“Why should you shed tears immoderately for them who have alltears wiped from their eyes?” asked a seventeenth-century preacherin a typical funeral sermon; “Why should you be swallowed up ofgrief for them who are swallowed up of joy?” “God allows us tears;Jacob wept over his dead father; tears give vent to grief,” thepreacher concedes, “but there is no reason we should grieve exces-sively for our pious friends, they receive a Crown, and shall wemourn when they have preferment?”56 “To persever / In obstinatecondolement,” Claudius tells his nephew in similar accents,

is a courseOf impious stubbornness, ’tis unmanly grief,It shows a will most incorrect to heaven,A heart unfortified, a mind impatient,An understanding simple and unschooled.

(1.2.92–97)

In 1601, when Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, Protestant preachershad been saying words to this effect for fifty years, trying to weantheir flock away from Purgatory and prayers for the dead and obsti-nate condolement.57 The argument seemed won: the chantrieswere all silent. But why should Shakespeare—who sympatheticallyrehearses the same sentiments in Twelfth Night, albeit in the mouthof the fool58—have given the Protestant position to his arch-villain


in Hamlet? And why should his Ghost—who might, after all, havesimply croaked for revenge, like the Senecan ghosts in Kyd—insistthat he has come from a place where his crimes are being burnedand purged away?

THE FIFTY-YEAR EFFECT

Perhaps there is what we might call a fifty-year effect, a time inthe wake of the great, charismatic ideological struggle in which therevolutionary generation that made the decisive break with thepast is all dying out and the survivors hear only hypocrisy in thesermons and look back with longing at the world they have lost.Perhaps, too, Shakespeare’s sensitivity to the status of the dead wasintensified by the death in 1596 of his son Hamnet (a name virtu-ally interchangeable with Hamlet in the period’s public records)and still more perhaps by the death of his father, John, in 1601,the most likely year for the writing of Hamlet. When in April 1757,the owner of Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon de-cided to retile the roof, one of the workmen, described as of “veryhonest, sober, and industrious character,” found an old documentbetween the rafters and the tiling. The document, six leavesstitched together, was a “spiritual testament” in fourteen articles.The testament was a formulary, conspicuously Catholic in content;written by the celebrated Italian priest Carlo Borromeo, it wastranslated, smuggled into England by Jesuits, and distributed tothe faithful. If genuine (for the original has disappeared), the copydiscovered in Stratford belonged to John Shakespeare. In it thedevout Catholic acknowledges that he is mortal and born to die“without knowing the hour, where, when, or how.” Fearing that hemay be “surprised upon a sudden,” the signer of the testamentdeclares his pious intention to receive at his death the sacramentsof confession, Mass, and extreme unction. If by some terrible “acci-dent” he does not receive these sacraments (that is, if he dies “un-houseled, dis-appointed, unaneled”), then he wishes God to par-don him. His appeal for spiritual assistance is not only to God, theblessed Virgin, and his guardian angel; it is also to his family: “I


John Shakspeare,” reads article XII, “do in like manner pray, andbeseech all my dear friends, Parents, and kinsfolks, by the bowelsof our Savior Jesus Christ, that since it is uncertain what lot willbefall me, for fear notwithstanding lest by reason of my sins, I beto pass, and stay a long while in Purgatory, they will vouchsafe toassist and succor me with their holy prayers, and satisfactory works,especially with the holy Sacrifice of the Mass, as being the mosteffectual means to deliver souls from their torments and pains;from the which, if I shall by God’s gracious goodness, and by theirvirtuous works be delivered, I do promise that I will not be ungrate-ful unto them, for so great a benefit.”59 There is a clear implicationto be drawn from this document: the playwright was probablybrought up in a Roman Catholic household in a time of officialsuspicion and persecution of recusancy.60 And there is, for our pur-poses, a further implication, particularly if we take seriously theevidence that Shakespeare conformed to the Church of England:in 1601 the Protestant playwright was haunted by the spirit of hisCatholic father pleading for suffrages to relieve his soul from thepains of Purgatory.

Shakespeare, in any case, is likely to have encountered A Suppli-cation for the Beggers, since it was reprinted in Foxe’s Acts and Monu-ments (1563), copies of which were widely distributed in officialsites, including, by government order, every cathedral and all thehouses of archbishops and bishops in the realm. Shakespeare alsomay well have read More’s Supplication of Souls. Like the Ghost ofold Hamlet, More’s poor souls cry out to be remembered, fear thedull forgetfulness of the living, disrupt the corrupt ease of theworld with horrifying tales of their sufferings, lament the remar-riage of their wives.61 But all of this and more Shakespeare couldhave got from texts other than More’s or from his own not incon-siderable imagination. Rather, these works are sources for Shake-speare’s play in a different sense: they stage an ontological argu-ment about spectrality and remembrance, a momentous publicdebate, that unsettled the institutional moorings of a crucial bodyof imaginative materials and therefore made them available fortheatrical appropriation.


PERSONIFICATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS

To grasp the significance of this unsettling, let us return to Fish’spamphlet. In reprinting A Supplication for the Beggers, Foxe providesa brief account of Fish’s life, conveniently omitting More’s claimthat before his death Fish “repented himself, and came into thechurch again, and forswore and forsook all the whole hill of thoseheresies out of which the fountain of that same good zeal sprang.”62

After he reprints Fish’s Supplication, Foxe glances briefly at More’sanswer “under the name and title of the poor silly souls pewlingout of Purgatory.”63 Foxe does not undertake in this place to refuteMore’s theology; instead he ridicules his art.

More makes the dead men’s souls, Foxe writes, “by a RhetoricalProsopopoeia, to speak out of Purgatory pinfold, sometimes lamenta-bly complaining, sometimes pleasantly dallying and scoffing, at theauthor of the Beggers’ book, sometimes scolding and railing athim, calling him fool, witless, frantic, an ass, a goose, a mad dog,an heretic, and all that naught is” (viii). Foxe wryly speculatesthat so much testiness must be the result of the heat in Purgatory,and he professes to be concerned that the souls’ lack of charitymay bring them to Hell rather than to Heaven. He confesses, how-ever, that he is not, after all, terribly concerned, for he does notthink there is any such place as “Purgatory at all (unless it be inM. More’s Utopia) as Master More’s Poetical vain doth imagine”(ix). “[U]nless it be in M. More’s Utopia”: Purgatory, as HughLatimer had sardonically remarked in a sermon preached in 1536,is a “pleasant fiction.”64 It is, in Foxe’s account, a no-place, a pieceof poetry with no more claim to reality than More’s famous imagi-nary commonwealth. Elsewhere Foxe will speak of the pope’s con-spiracies and cunning frauds, but not here. All of the passionateclaims to remembrance, the institutional structures, the dogmaticelaborations by sophisticated theologians, the popular supersti-tions, the charges of heresy, the indulgences, the confraternitiesand masses and chantries, the tales of ghostly apparitions: all arefor a moment at least deposited not in the realm of lies but in therealm of poetry.


The rhetorical advantage of this polemical game is that Foxe canproceed to play not the committed ideologue but the judiciouscritic. Prosopopoeia—personification, the making of what is absentto speak—is the rhetorical device that lies behind all haunting.Quintilian had written of the figure prosopopoeia that it “gives bothvariety and animation to eloquence in a wonderful degree,” so thatit is “allowable even to bring down the gods from heaven and evokethe dead.” But, he warned, “our inventions of that sort will meetwith credit only so far as we represent people saying what it is notunreasonable to suppose that they may have meditated.”65 Hence,in Foxe’s account of The Supplication of Souls, More, “the authorand contriver of this Poetical book,” should be censured “for notkeeping Decorum Personae, as a perfect Poet should have done.”“They that give precepts of Art,” Foxe explains, “do note this in allPoetical fictions, as a special observation, to foresee and expresswhat is convenient for every person, according to his degree andcondition, to speak and utter.” Therefore, he continues, if byMore’s own account the souls in Purgatory are made clean andwholesome by their sufferings, then he should not have depictedthem railing “so fumishly” against their enemies. They should,after all, be on their way to becoming more charitable, not less.

The point here is not to make a serious argument against Purga-tory—that has been done by many, he notes, including JohnFrith—but to make fun of it, to expose it to ridicule. More hadtried to exploit horror, fear, and guilt; Foxe tries to blow these awaywith laughter. Indeed, he proposes to treat The Supplication of Soulsas a comedy. “It maketh me to laugh,” he writes, “to see ye merryAntiques of M. More,” whose devil arrives in Purgatory “laughing,grinning, and gnashing his teeth.” But then he begins to worryabout those teeth: how could the evil angel, “being a spiritual andno corporal substance,” have “teeth to gnash & a mouth to grin?”And where exactly, he wonders, was More standing to see the devilopen his mouth so wide that the souls of Purgatory all saw histeeth? It must, he decides, have been in Utopia, “where M. More’sPurgatory is founded.”66

This polemical performance seems very far indeed from Shake-speare’s Hamlet, which probes precisely the fears, longings, and


confusions that Foxe attempts to ridicule. The Ghost comes fromPurgatory bewailing his failure to receive full Christian last ritesbut then demands that his son avenge his death, thereby initiatinga nightmare that will eventually destroy not only his usurpingbrother but also Polonius, Ophelia, Laertes, Rosencrantz, Guilden-stern, Gertrude, and his own son. He tells Hamlet not to let “theroyal bed of Denmark be / A couch for luxury and damned incest”(1.5.82–83) but then warns his son not to taint his mind or let hissoul contrive anything against his mother. Hamlet receives themost vivid confirmation of the nature of the afterlife, with its“sulph’rous and tormenting flames” (1.5.3), but then, in a spectac-ular and mysterious act of forgetting, speaks of death as the “undis-covered country from whose bourn / No traveller returns”(3.1.81–82). These are the kinds of representational contradic-tions that Foxe mercilessly mocks. To notice, publish, and circulatethem throughout the realm is to declare that key theological prin-ciples and emotional experiences cannot hold together, and thatthe institution that generated them is bankrupt, worthy only ofcontempt and laughter.

But in Hamlet the same contradictions that should lead to deri-sion actually intensify the play’s uncanny power. And it is preciselyFoxe’s comedy that helpedmake Shakespeare’s tragedy possible. Itdid so by participating in a violent ideological struggle that turnednegotiations with the dead from an institutional process governedby the church to a poetic process governed by guilt, projection,and imagination. Purgatory exists in the imaginary universe ofHamlet, but only as what the suffering prince, in a different context,calls “a dream of passion” (2.2.554). Indeed, there is a striking linkbetween Hamlet’s description of the player who

in a fiction, in a dream of passion,Could force his soul so to his whole conceitThat from her working all his visage wanned,Tears in his eyes, distraction in’s aspect,A broken voice, and his whole function suitingWith forms to his conceit,

(2.2.529–34)


and the Ghost’s description of the effect that his tale of tormentwould have on Hamlet:

I could a tale unfold whose lightest wordWould harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres,Thy knotty and combined locks to part,And each particular hair to stand on endLike quills upon the fretful porcupine.

(1.5.15–20)

The link is the astonishingly palpable physiological effect of spec-tral fiction, dream, tale: “And all for nothing” (2.2.534).

Of course, within the play’s fiction, Hamlet does not know thatPurgatory is a fiction, as the state-sanctioned church of Shake-speare’s time had declared it to be. On the contrary, he is desper-ate to establish the veracity of the Ghost’s tale—“I’ll take theGhost’s word for a thousand pound” (3.2.263–64), he exults afterthe play-within-the-play—and hence to establish that the Ghost isin reality his father’s spirit and not the devil. But this reality istheatrical rather than theological; it can accommodate elements,such as a Senecan call for revenge, that would radically underminechurch doctrine. At the same time, it can offer the viewer, in anunforgettably vivid dream of passion, many of the deep imaginativeexperiences, the tangled longing, guilt, pity, and rage, evoked byMore. Does this mean that Shakespeare was participating in a secu-larization process, one in which the theater offers a disenchantedversion of what the cult of Purgatory once offered? Perhaps. Butthe palpable effect is something like the reverse:Hamlet immeasur-ably intensifies a sense of the weirdness of the theater, its proximityto certain experiences that had been organized and exploited byreligious institutions and rituals.

Not all forms of energy in Shakespeare’s theater, of course, havebeen transferred, openly or covertly, from the zone of the real tothe zone of the imaginary. Plays can borrow, imitate, and reflectmuch of what passes for everyday reality without necessarily evacu-ating this reality or exposing it as made-up. But the power of Shake-speare’s theater is frequently linked to its appropriation of weak-


ened or damaged institutional structures. It is conceivable thatShakespeare, with his recusant family background, his educationin Stratford by teachers linked to Campion and the Jesuits, his ownpossible links to Lancashire recusants, felt a covert loyalty to thesestructures and a dismay that they were being gutted. Hamlet mayprovide a suitably disguised articulation of this dismay in thespeech of the messenger who rushes in to tell Claudius to savehimself from the rioters, a speech peculiar enough to provokeeighteenth-century editors to elevate the character to “Gentle-man.” “The rabble call him lord,” the messenger reports,

And, as the world were now but to begin,Antiquity forgot, custom not known,The ratifiers and props of every word,They cry, “Choose we! Laertes shall be king.”

(4.5.98–102)

It is a bit strange to invoke antiquity and custom in defense of theregime of the upstart Claudius; they seem more suitable as theratifiers and props of the Catholic Church, whose apologists, likeThomas More, frequently likened the way its doctrines evolvedover time to the way in which words gradually acquire their stablemeanings.

We do not, however, need to believe that Shakespeare was him-self a secret Catholic sympathizer; we need only to recognize howalert he was to thematerials that were being made available to him.At a deep level there is something magnificently opportunistic,appropriative, absorptive, even cannibalistic about Shakespeare’sart, as if poor, envious Robert Greene had sensed something moreimportant than he knew when he attacked the “upstart crow, beau-tified with our feathers.” In the case of Purgatory, important forceshad been busily struggling for decades to prepare the playwright’sfeast. And the struggle did not end with the performance of theplay or the playwright’s death.

THE OLD SNARE

In 1624, a year after the publication of the First Folio, John Gee,a staunch Protestant who confesses that he had once himself been


tangled in the Jesuits’ subtle nets, published a book called NewShreds of the Old Snare.67 Gee relates a series of incidents during thepast three years in which Jesuits have tried to convert youngwomen to Catholicism, to induce them to flee to the Continentand join nunneries, and to lure them to give their money to theCatholic Church. To achieve their cynical ends, “the thrice hon-ourable Company of Iesuites, Players to the Popes Holiness” (10),turn “heaven and holy things” into “Theatrical and fabulous tricks”(16). Their principal device is to stage mysterious apparitions: witha burst of light, “a woman all in white, with countenance pale andwan, with long tresses of hair hanging down to her middle” (3)appears before an impressionable young woman and declares thatshe has come from the torments of Purgatory. The young womanis told that she can avert these same torments after death if she is“Nunnified” (7). In a related trick, the apparition—“a shape likeunto a woman all in white: from her face seemed to come littlestreams of fire, or glittering light” (12)—declares that she is SaintLucy, urging the wealthy woman to whom she appears to followher holy example by giving away her worldly wealth to the priestsand joining a convent.

Gee takes it upon himself to dispel the illusion, which is notthe result, as some think, of witchcraft but, rather, of theater. Themysterious light, he explains, can be produced by “Paper Lanternsor transparent Glasses” enhanced by the “artificial directing ofrefractions.”68 The acting can be done “by some nimble handedand footed Novice Jesuitable Boy, that can as easily put on the personof St. Lucy or The virgin Mary, as a Play-boy can act winged Mercury,or Eagle mounted Ganymedes.” The key thing is to understandthat the Jesuits are a gifted troupe of actors. “I see no reason,”Gee writes, “but that they should set up a company for them-selves, which surely will put down The Fortune, Red-Bull, Cock-pit, &Globe” (17).

But then, as if he has had second thoughts about their chancesfor success in the competitive world of London theater, Gee con-siders three problems with their performances. First, he observes,“the plots of their Comedies twang all upon one string” (18). It isas if they own a single costume and can imagine only one charac-ter: “[N]one comes in Acting but A Woman, A Woman, A Woman,


arrayed in white, white, white.” In a repertory company performingdaily, the device will quickly lose its force. Still, if you are seeing itfor the first time, it is, Gee concedes, an impressive show.

The second problem is the more serious one of a failure to ob-serve decorum, the logical and representational contradictionsthat Foxe had enjoyed observing in More. The Poet, Gee observes,makes an obvious blunder by sending a ghost in a white robe “fromthe smoky burning Kitchen of Purgatory” (19). Surely that robeshould have been scorched. But to this and similar incongruities,Gee counters, with mock generosity, that, after all, “the Poet keptwithin his Circle. For he well knew that deep passions, especiallyaffright and astonishing admiration, do for the time bereave andsuspend exact inquiring discourse” (19). Once you regard the ap-parition as performance and not as truth, you can dispense withanxiety on the score of incoherence and admire the calculation ofa powerful psychic and somatic effect.

The third problem is the most serious: quite simply, “they maketheir spectators pay too dear” (20). Gee had explained how the Jesuitsmanaged to get the astronomical sum of two hundred poundsfrom just one of their victims; that is, he soberly observes, a verydear market price for what is actually being purchased:

Representations and Apparitions from the dead might beseen far cheaper at other Play-houses. As for example, theGhost in Hamlet, Don Andrea’s Ghost in Hieronimo. As for flashesof light, we might see very cheap in the Comedy of Pyramus andThisbe, where one comes in with a Lantern and Acts Moone-shine. (20)69

“As for example, the Ghost in Hamlet”: this extraordinary remarkgoes to the heart of the process I have been describing. With thedoctrine of Purgatory and the elaborate practices that grew uparound it, the church had provided a powerful method of negotiat-ing with the dead, or, rather, with those who were at once dead andyet, since they could still speak, appeal, and appall, not completelydead. The Protestant attack on the “middle state of souls” and themiddle place those souls inhabited destroyed this method for mostpeople in England, but it did not destroy the longings and fears


that Catholic doctrine had focused and exploited. Instead, as Geeperceives, the space of Purgatory becomes the space of the stagewhere old Hamlet’s Ghost is doomed for a certain term to walkthe night. That term has now lasted some four hundred years, andit has brought with it a cult of the dead that I and the readers ofthis book have been serving.

E P I L O G U E

)(

HOW SERIOUSLY would Shakespeare have taken the notion of histheater as a cult of the dead?1 Does he conceive of his characters assomething like ghosts, endowed with the power to claim suffrages?2

Does he share John Gee’s perception that the stage offers custom-ers inexpensive “Representations and Apparitions from the dead”?There is very little direct evidence of a self-conscious and calcu-lated theatrical appropriation of the old system in which spiritssolicit prayers and indulgences confer liberation from pain. But itis intriguing that the Chorus in Henry V asks the audience’s pardonfor the “flat unraised spirits that hath dared / On this unworthyscaffold to bring forth” (Prologue, lines 9–10) the great spectacleof Agincourt. The spirits are not, to be sure, the ghosts of the mon-archs themselves; they are spectral aids to the “imaginary forces”(line 18) that must be deployed by the audience. But there is herea trace at least of the strange scene of conjuring in Marlowe’sFaustus in which, at the request of the German emperor, the magi-cian calls up spirits to present the shapes of the long-dead Alexan-der and his paramour.In an oddmoment near the end of his career Shakespeare seems

once again to be recalling Marlowe’s scene, when in The Tempestthe magician Prospero presents the betrothal masque—“Somevanity of mine art” (4.1.41)—to Ferdinand and Miranda. Faustushad enjoined the emperor in effect to behave like the polite specta-tor of a play:

My lord, I must forewarn your MajestyThat when my spirits present the royal shapesOf Alexander and his paramour,

259EP I LO G U E

Your Grace demand no questions of the KingBut in dumb silence let them come and go.

(4.2.46–50)

So, too, Prospero tells his daughter and her betrothed to watchwithout speaking: “No tongue, all eyes! Be silent” (4.1.59).Shakespeare’s magician elsewhere confesses that he has prac-

ticed necromancy:

[G]raves at my commandHave waked their sleepers, oped, and let ’em forthBy my so potent art.

(5.1.48–50)

With the spectacle of Iris, Ceres, and Juno, however, his prospec-tive son-in-law understands that he is witnessing not the souls ofthe dead but something less ominous. “This is a most majestic vi-sion, and / Harmonious charmingly,” he says, “May I be bold / Tothink these spirits?” “Spirits,” Prospero confirms,

which by mine artI have from their confines called to enactMy present fancies.

(4.1.118–22)

Shakespeare has taken the form of Marlowe’s spectacle—a silentaudience watching the magician’s spirits “present the royalshapes”—and pushed it more explicitly toward theater. “Our revelsnow are ended,” Prospero explains to the startled Ferdinand, whenthe wedding pageant suddenly vanishes,

These our actors,As I foretold you, were all spirits, andAre melted into air, into thin air.

(4.1.148–50)

The famous lines that follow, linking the evanescence of the spirit-actors to the evanescence of “the great globe itself,” are not a de-mystification of the theater; they are a revelation of something

260 EP I LO G U E

theatrical, insubstantial, fading, and ultimately ghostlike in lifeitself:

And like the baseless fabric of this vision,The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,The solemn temples, the great globe itself,Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve;And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuffAs dreams are made on, and our little lifeIs rounded with a sleep.

(4.1.151–58)

Here the dreamlike emptiness long associated with the transitoryillusions of the theater is carried over into all that lies beyond theboundaries of the stage.For a character in a play what lies beyond these boundaries is a

kind of death, or rather, as Prospero puts it, “a sleep.” Sleep getsat the possibility, crucial in a repertory company, of an awakening,the theater’s equivalent of a resurrection. But it also gets at thequeasy sense, so powerfully expressed by Hamlet, of an ongoingcondition that is potentially nightmarish:

For in that sleep of death what dreams may comeWhen we have shuffled off this mortal coilMust give us pause.

(3.1.68–70)

The Tempest comes to an end—the little lives of the characters allrounded with a sleep—and then, astonishingly, continues beyondthe confines of its plot with the strange spectacle of a theatricalafterlife. Delicately poised between the imaginary world of the playand the commercial world of the theater, between the princelymagician and the impoverished actor, Prospero turns directly tothe spectators and pleads for suffrages:

Now I wantSpirits to enforce, art to enchant;And my ending is despair

261EP I LO G U E

Unless I be relieved by prayer,Which pierces so, that it assaultsMercy itself, and frees all faults.As you from crimes would pardoned be,Let your indulgence set me free.

(Epilogue, lines 13–20)

“Indulgence” need only mean the gratification of a desire—herethe desire for applause—but it also had in Shakespeare’s time thespecific, technical sense that it still possesses in Catholic theology:the church’s spiritual power to remit punishment due to sin. Thistheological sense is here strongly reinforced by the reference toprayer and by the rapid sketch of a scenario that we have repeat-edly seen: a tormented soul saved from despair and lifted up tobliss through the piety of loving friends and the good offices of thechurch. From this perspective the speaker of the epilogue, whetherhis sin is sorcery or playacting, sounds like a spirit who is pleadingfor our help. He is not, of course, crying out from Purgatory; he isspeaking from the stage. And in place of prayers, we offer theactor’s ticket to bliss: applause.

N OT E S

)(

I have, in the interests of readability, modernized the spelling and punctuation of all thetexts quoted in this book, except in the notes, where I have retained the original.

PROLOGUE

1. “Shakespeare Bewitched,” in New Historical Literary Study: Essays on ReproducingTexts, Representing History, ed. Jeffrey N. Cox and Larry J. Reynolds (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 108–35; “The Eating of the Soul,” Repre-sentations 48 (1994): 97–116; “La souris mangeuse d’hostie: les miettes du repaseucharistique,” Traverses 5 (1993): 42–54, revised as “TheMousetrap,” in Practic-ing New Historicism [with Catherine Gallagher] (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 2000); “Remnants of the Sacred in Early Modern England,” in Subject andObject in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, andPeter Stallybrass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 337–45.

2. Joel Fineman, The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literary Tradition (Cambridge: MITPress, 1991).

3. See Saul Lieberman, Texts and Studies (New York: Ktav PublishingHouse, 1974),esp. pp. 29–56, 235–72.

4. The Sermons of John Donne, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson and George R. Potter, 10vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1954), 7:168–69. Donne’s text is 1 Cor. 15:29: “Else, what shall they do which are baptizedfor the dead? If the dead rise not at all, why are they then baptized for thedead?” His purpose is to disprove the Catholic claim that “this Baptisme for theDead must necessarily prove Purgatory, and their Purgatory” (165).

5. Leon Wieseltier, Kaddish (New York: Knopf, 1998), p. 194.

6. The complex relations between Judaism and Christianity—relations that by nomeans always display the priority of Israel—have recently been illuminated by,among others, Ivan Marcus, Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in MedievalEurope (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). and Daniel Boyarin, Dying forGod: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press, 1999).

7. For a fascinating argument about the small number of Jews who were living inearly modern England, see James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York:Columbia University Press, 1996).

8. 7:169. Donne traveled abroad on several occasions, including a voyage in 1619,as chaplain with Viscount Doncaster, that took him to Germany and the Nether-lands, where he would have had ample opportunity to observe Jewish worship.

264 N OT ES T O C H A P T ER O N E

CHAPTER ONE: A POET’S FABLE

1. Simon Fish, A Supplicacyon for the Beggers, reprinted as Appendix B in vol. 7 ofThe Complete Works of St. Thomas More, ed. Frank Manley, Germain Marc’hadour,Richard Marius, and Clarence Miller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990),p. 412. All citations are to this edition.

2. In Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Longman, 1988),Paul Slack notes that grain was scarce in some localities in 1527–1528, andthere may have been cases of starvation, though, like most social historians, heemphasizes that the figures are extremely unreliable.

3. John Foxe, “The Story of M. Symon Fishe,” in Actes and Monumentes, quoted inFrederick J. Furnivall, ed. A Supplication for the Beggers, Early English Text Society,e.s., 13 (London: N. Trubner, 1871), p. vi.

4. On Fish and the early Protestant agitators, see W. A. Clebsch, England’s EarliestProtestants (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964); Susan Brigden, London andthe Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989); A. G. Dickens, The English Reforma-tion, 2d ed. (London: Batsford, 1989).

5. Etienne de la Boetie, Contre un (Discours de la servitude voluntaire), in OeuvresCompletes, ed. Louis Desgraves (Bordeaux: Blake & Co., 1991) [English transla-tion: The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, ed. Murray N.Rothbard, 2d ed. (Montreal: Blackrose, 1997)]. La Boetie’s analysis is secular,but it was quickly adopted by the Huguenots.

6. It may at first seem difficult to understand why so many people would willinglyabandon their innate freedoms, but in fact the process is quite simple. A tinygroup chooses, for strategic purposes, to declare allegiance to a single person.The qualities of that person—who may, for all anyone knows, be a dolt or ascoundrel—are not particularly relevant; what matters is his (or her) symbolicposition at the apex of the system. Nor does it greatly matter if the members ofthe inner circle have any serious regard for the person to whom they declaretheir allegiance; what matters is that their immediate dependents feel similarlybound to them and, through them, bound to the person at the pinnacle. Eachof those dependents in turn has his dependents, and before long tens of thou-sands of people are locked into a system that is exploiting rather than protectingor serving them.

7. See Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History(Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), esp. pp. 309–10. Hudson argues that Fish’s Suppli-cacyon for the Beggers “is a polemic entirely couched in Lollard terms” (501).

8. John Bale, King Johan, in Complete Plays, ed. Peter Happe (Cambridge: D. S.Brewer, 1985), p. 70.

9. William Tyndale, An Answer to Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue, The Supper of the Lord,ed. Henry Walter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Parker Soci-ety, 1850), pp. 145–56.

10. Cardinal William Allen, A Defense and Declaration of the Catholike Churches Doc-trine, touching Purgatory (Antwerp, 1566), fol. 215v.

265N OT ES T O C H A P T ER O N E

11. “Purgatory did not exist before 1170 at the earliest,” in Jacques Le Goff, TheBirth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1981), p. 135. Le Goff is interested in the first use of the term Purgatoriumto designate a particular place; many of the concepts connected to the doctrineof Purgatory are of great antiquity. As a neuter adjective, purgatorium had longbeen used; as a noun it entered medieval Latin only in the second half of thetwelfth century.

12. The Lay Folks Mass Book, ed. Thomas Frederick Simmons Early English TextSociety, o.s., 71 (London: Oxford University Press, 1879), pp. 42–44. Here andelsewhere in the body of the text, but not in the notes, I have modernized theletters “thorn” to “th” and “yogh” to “gh.”

See likewise the enumeration of the dead in the “Bidding Prayer” Simmonscites fromManuale secundum usummatris ecclesie Eboracensis, published byWynkynde Worde in 1509: “Ye shall make a speciall prayer for your fadres sowles: foryour moders sowles: godfaders sowles and godmothers sowles: broders sowlesand sisters sowles: and for all your elders sowles: and for all the sowles that yeor I be bownde to praye for. and specyally for all the sowles whose bones areburyed in this chirche or in this chirche yerde: or in any other holy place. andin especyall for all the sowles that bydes the great mercy of almighty god in thebytter peynes of Purgatory: that god for his great mercy releas them of theyrpeyne if it be his blessyd wyll. And that our prayers may sumwhat stande themin stede: Every man and woman of your charite / helpe them with a Pater nosterand an Ave maria” (80).

13. On All Souls’ Day, see David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religionand the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (New York: Oxford University Press,1997): “In the eleventh century, probably between 1024 and 1033, Cluny begancommemorating the dead on November 2, the day after All Saints’ Day. Theprestige of the Cluniac order was such that before long the ‘Day of the Dead’was being celebrated throughout Christendom” (125). On bell ringing, see “AnEpistle Occasioned By The Most Intollerable Jangling Of The Papists’ Bells OnAll Saints’ Night, The Eve Of All Soules’ Daye, Being Then Vsed To Be RungAll Night (And All As If the Towne Were On Fire) For The Soules Of Those InPurgatorye.Written FromThouars To Saumur, ToMr. Bryan Palmes,” inWilliamBrowne, The Whole Works, ed. W. Carew Hazlitt (London: Whittington and Wil-kins, 1869), 2:242–44. On “soul cakes,” see John Mirk, Mirk’s Festial: A Collectionof Homilies, ed. Theodor Erbe, Early English Text Society, e.s., 96, Part 1 (Lon-don: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co, 1905), p. 270, and Cressy, Birth, Mar-riage, and Death, pp. 8–9, 30. Protestant authorities attempted to put an end tothese practices, but as late at 1578 the parishioners of oneWorcestershire villagehad to appear before the bishop’s court to explain themselves “about ringingon All Halloween day at night” (30).

14. The Primer in English after the use of Sarum (Rowen: N. LeRoux, 1538).

15. “Dominus noster Jesus Christus, qui vos et nos redemit suo pretiosissimo san-guine, dignetur vos a poenis liberare.” The Latin is fromWilliamMaskell,Monu-menta Ritualia Ecclesiae Anglicanae, 2d ed., 3 vols., (Oxford: Clarendon, 1882),


3:180. I use the translation of Thomas Rogers, The Catholic Doctrine of the Churchof England (Cambridge: University Press for the Parker Society, 1854), p. 214.

Comparable prayers for the souls of those buried in the churchyard are in-cluded in the Sarum Missal and Processionale. See Missale Ad Usum Insignis etPraeclarae Ecclesiae Sarum [Missale Sarum], ed. Francis Dickinson (Oxford: J. Par-ker, 1861–1883), pp. 877–78. For an English translation, see The Sarum Missal,trans. Frederick E. Warren (London: A. R. Mowbray, 1913), 2:192–93. See like-wise the prayer “for alle soules whos bonys resteth in this chirche and chircheyard” in Ceremonies and Processions of the Cathedral Church of Salisbury, ed. Chr.Wordsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1901)—an edition of theSarum Processionale, written 1445, with additions—p. 31.

16. See Peter Brown, “Vers la naissance du purgatoire: Amnistie et penitence dansle christianisme occidental de l’Antiquite tardive au Haut Moyen Age,” in An-nales Histoire Science Sociale 6 (1997): 1247–61.

17. A Treatise of the Manner and Mede of the Mass, Vernon MS of the Bodleian, ca.1375; text from a century earlier.

Wust I my Fader in flesch and felleWeore holliche I-holden in helle,ther weore non hope of hele.To preye for him I couthe no Red,No more then for A Dogge were ded,But let hem with him dele.Yit I rede we go to chircheGodes werkes for-to worcheYif we wole wone in wele.Sethe hit is vnknowe to vs,We schul preye for alle FidelibusTo Rewe soules that beth lele.

(Lines 269–80)

(Quoted from Appendix IV of The Lay Folks Mass Book, pp. 135–36. The text,called “How to Hear Mass,” is also found in The Minor Poems of the Vernon MS,Part 2, ed. F. J. Furnivall, Early English Text Society, o.s., 117 [London: KeganPaul, 1901], p. 500, lines 265–76.)

18. Maskell, Monumenta Ritualia Ecclesiae Anglicanae, 3:180n.

19. Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, p. 463. See the story told in Noel Taillepied,ATreatise of Ghosts [1588], ed. and trans. Montague Summers (London: Fortune,1933), pp. 75–76, involving a priest who notes of the village church near Meu-lan-sur-Seine that “I was preaching in this church, and the stench of corruptionand odour of death was so overpowering that we all feared some putrid fevermight result.”

20. “The satisfactions of Christ are so superabundant,” writes one mid-seven-teenth-century English Catholic, “that they are sufficient to supply any want of


satisfaction, which any man or men can haue” (James Mumford, A Remembrancefor the Living to Pray for the Dead [St. Omer, 1641], p. 133).

21. John Lydgate, “On de Profundis,” in Minor Poems, ed. Henry N. McCracken,Early English Text Society, e.s., 107 (London: Kegan Paul, 1911), p. 80. Lyd-gate’s poem is in the form of a commentary on the de Profundis which aims toshow why that Psalm is “[s]eid as folk passe by ther sepulturys.”

22. Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. WilliamGranger Ryan, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 2:279–80.On the discussion of Purgatory in The Golden Legend, see Alain Boureau, Lalegende doree (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1984), pp. 49–52; also Le Goff, The Birthof Purgatory, pp. 321–24.

23. Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, 2:283.

24. Aquinas, Supplement, quoted in Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, p. 273. Aquinasis following a statement made by Augustine in his Commentary on Psalm 37: “Al-though some will be saved by fire, this fire will be more terrible than anythingthat a man can suffer in this life” (in Le Goff, p. 68). This view was frequentlyreiterated. See, for example, this complaint of a soul in Purgatory in a poem byThomas Hoccleve (1413–1446):

The leeste torment of this purgatorieThat we souffren / exceedith in sharpnesseTormentes all of the world transitorie.Heere, of torment / more is the bittirnesseIn an hour / then the worldes wikkidnesseMay hurte or greeue in an .C. yeer:Greet is thaffliccioun that we han heer.

(Thomas Hoccleve, “How to Learn to Die,” in Minor Poems, ed. Frederick J.Furnivall, Early English Text Society, e.s., 61 [London: Kegan Paul, 1892], lines729–35.)

25. The next day, the tale goes,Master Silo recited the following couplet to his class—

Linquo choax ranis, cra corvis, vanaque vanis,Ad logicam pergo, quae mortis non timet ergo—

and took refuge in religion. William Caxton, who translated The Golden Legendin 1483, omitted the couplet, whose scholastic joke may have baffled or failedto amuse him. Ryan translates: “I leave croaking to the frogs, cawing to thecrows, vanities to the vain, / Therefore I stay with logic, which fears not the ergoof death” (2:283 n. 2).

26. Chaucer’s Summoner’s Tale refers to the practice: “ Trentals,’ seyde he,‘deliueren fro penaunce / Hir freendes soules, as well olde as yonge’ ” (lines1724–25 of Fragment III, in Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. LarryBenson [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987]). In The Resurrection of the Masse(Strasbourg, 1554), the Protestant Hughe Hilarie parodies the Catholic salespitch:


A trentall of masses is very profitableFor a soule departed at euery season/For that vnto glory without any fableWil bring the soule with all expedicion.

(Lines 251–54)

And the OED includes a citation that indicates that not everyone found the pricemoderate: “For which Masses, Diriges, and Trentals, huge summes of money aregiuen daily” (from Thomas Bell, Motives Concerning Romish Faith and Religion, 2ded. [Cambridge: Legate, 1605]). Beginning with Gregory XIII (reigned 1572–1585), popes founded special altars privileged for the dead at which one masssaid any day of the year would free a particular soul from Purgatory. In principle,these altars should have made the obtaining of suffrages simpler and far lessexpensive, but, as Pierroberto Scaramella and others have shown, the faithful,as if mistrusting the papal assurance, routinely chose to pay for hundreds orthousands of masses at these privileged altars. See Christine Gottler, Die Kunstdes Fegebeuers nach der Reformation: Kirchliche Schenkungen, Ablass und Almosen inAntwerpen und Bologna um 1600 (Mainz am Rhein: Philipp von Zabern, 1996).

27. As chronicles and account books suggest, the historical Henry did indeed paylavishly for Richard’s Westminster reburial. All citations of Shakespeare, unlessotherwise noted, are to The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al.(New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).

28. Henry goes on to acknowledge the worthlessness of these measures:

More will I do,Though all that I can do is nothing worth,Since that my penitence comes after illImploring pardon.

(4.2.284–87)

Still, he performs his ritual acts, and the English victory may suggest that hisplea for a deferral of the divine judgment—“Not today, O Lord, / O not today”(4.2.274–75)—was successful. Henry’s remark that he has the poor “in yearlypay” captures nicely the frank medieval commodification of the prayers ofthe poor, though it may also subtly reflect Reformation irony about this com-modification.

29. Howard Colvin, Architecture and the After-life (New Haven: Yale University Press,1991), p. 172. (Presumably, Colvin is thinking only of England here, since theremust have been even more expensive—not to mention larger—structures builtelsewhere.)

30. “Testamentum Regis Henrici Octavi,” in Thomas Rymer, Foedera, 2d ed., 20vols. (London: J. Tonson, 1726–1735), 15:111. Cf. Lacy Baldwin Smith, “TheLast Will and Testament of Henry VIII: A Question of Perspective," Journal ofBritish Studies 2 (1962): 14–27.

31. Barnaby Googe, The Popish Kingdome, or reign of Antichrist (London: HenryDenham, 1570; reprint, New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1972).


Googe (1540?–1594) was translating from the Latin of Thomas Naogeorgus (orKirchmeyer).

32. Christopher Haigh, Reformation and Resistance in Tudor Lancashire (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 71.

33. See, for example, Clive Burgess, “ ‘By Quick and by Dead’: Wills and PiousProvision in Late Medieval Bristol,” English Historical Review 102 (1987):837–58.

34. In Living and Dying in England, 1100–1540: The Monastic Experience (Oxford:Clarendon, 1993), Barbara Harvey notes that in the later Middle Ages, the lifeof the monks of Westminster Abbey “was still strongly influenced, as it had beensince the eleventh century, by the contemporary belief in a Purgatory where theexpiation of the consequences of sin could be assisted” by the endowment ofpost-obit masses and other ritual acts. “Directly or indirectly, the monks of West-minster owedmost of their endowments to their place in this penitential system,and other features of their life were affected too. For example, because theysaid Masses for the royal and noble dead, they were involved in the distributionof alms on a notable scale” (210). Fish complains that the monks rarely disbursethe money they have been given to distribute to the poor, and writes wryly that“[i]f the Abbot of Westminster shulde sing euery day as many masses for hisfounders as he is bounde to do by his fouindacion, .M monkes were to fewe”(Supplication for the Beggers, p. 422).

The benefactions were not only from the rich. See Haigh: “The most distinc-tive feature of popular religion was its preoccupation with death and the ensur-ing of salvation. This explains the detailed provisions for prayers found in mostwills, for the period to be spent in purgatory depended, in part, on the arrange-ment of masses and prayers” (Reformation and Resistance in Tudor Lancashire,p. 68).

35. Cf. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England,c.1400–c.1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992): “According to thespirit who revealed the secrets of Purgatory in the ‘Revelacyone schewed to aneholy woman’ of 1422, prayers offered in ignorance for a soul damned were notwasted, though they could not help the intended beneficiary; instead ‘the helpeand the mede turne to the nexte of his kynne in purgatorye and hastelye spedetham owte of thaire pergatorie’ ” (354).

36. See the discussion of “All Souls” in The South English Legendary, ed. Charlotted’Evelyn and Anna J. Mill, Early English Text Society, o.s., 236 (London: OxfordUniversity Press, 1956), 2:464:

For if ıe preost enioigneı penance / ıat ne beo no8t ful ynou8In purgatorie hit worı i8ulde / & elles hit were wou8For penance is in [ıre] manere / lasse oıer more[Oıer] euene after a manes sinne / & no8t after ıe preostes loreIf hit is more ıan ıe sinne / & a man hit do iwisAl hit schal in heuene turne / to eching of his blisIf he is euene to ıe sinne / ıe sinne he wole aquencheAc no8t if he is to lute / ech man him ıerof ıenche


& to a fol [prest] ne triste he no8t / ıat to lute penance him setFor siker her oıer elleswhar / eche synne worı ibet.

(Lines 39–48)

37. Gret loue ıer moste nede beo / ıat bituene hem wereWiıoute loue & deol of hurte / such ıing no8t worı nere.

(The South English Legendary, 2:465, lines 67–68.)

38. Quoted in Henry W. Sullivan, Grotesque Purgatory: A Study of Cervantes’s“Don Quixote,” Part II (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,1996), p. 98.

39. Purgatory Survey’d. Or, A Particular accompt of the happy, and yet thrice unhappystate, of the Souls there. (Paris, 1663), trans. by Richard Thimelby of Etienne Binet,De l’estat heureux et malheureux des ames souffrantes du Purgatoire, p. 55.

40. Ibid., pp. 244-45.

41. Ibid., p. 156.

42. Quoted in Hudson, The Premature Reformation, p. 301n.

43. John Wedderburn, “Of the Fals Fyre of Purgatorie,” in A Compendious Book ofGodly and Spiritual Songs [1578], ed. A. F. Mitchell, Scottish Text Society (Edin-burgh: Blackwood, 1897), p. 187 (lines 13–16).

44. Cf. Henry Jones (bishop of Clogher), Saint Patricks Purgatory, containing theDescription, Originall, Progresse, and Demolition of that Superstitious place (London:Royston, 1647): “[W]hat hope The poorer sort of people may have, of being freedfrom Purgatory, in whose scorching flames they are likely long to fry, they see, whocan well tell, that no penny, no Paternoster” (60). Cf. too the street cry of thecharacter called Error in Phineas Fletcher’s The Locusts, or Apollyonists:

Come, buy crownes, scepters, miters, crosiers,Buy thefts, blood, incests, oaths, buy all for gaine:With gold buy out all Purgatory feares,With gold buy Heaven and Heavens Soveraigne.

(Lines 264–67)

(In Poetical Works, ed. Frederick S. Boas [Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1908], p. 60.)

45. This is Le Goff’s summary of Aquinas’s argument, The Birth of Purgatory,p. 276.

46. Hudson, The Premature Reformation, p. 300.

47. “Jacke Upland” in Poetical Poems and Songs relating to English History, ed. ThomasWright, Rolls Series (London: Longman, 1861), 2:21 (lines 177–86).

48. Ibid., lines 217–19, 231–32.

49. See, especially, Alan Kreider, English Chantries: The Road to Dissolution (Cam-bridge: HarvardUniversity Press, 1979), and Sandra Raban,Mortmain Legislationand the English Church, 1279–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1982).


50. The play is in Bale, Complete Plays, 1:35.

51. Goulafres, as Germain Marc’hadour notes in the Yale Edition of More’s Suppli-cation of Souls, is linked etymologically to the French goulafre/gouliafre from theO.F. gole (animal’s mouth) and also possibly to goulf(r)e (deep hole).

52. The Obedience of a Christian Man, in William Tyndale, Doctrinal Treatises, ed.Henry Walter (London: Parker Society, 1848), p. 245.

53. R. W., A Recantation of famous Pasquin of Rome (London: John Daye, 1570),lines 29–34.

54. Catholics (including Thomas More) argued that Hunne had committed sui-cide. Protestants argued that he was murdered by thugs in the employ of thebishop of London and his chancellor, William Horsey. In February 1515 a Lon-don coroner’s jury found that Hunne had been murdered, and named Horseyand the two jailors as the killers. The case figures prominently in Foxe.

55. Exposition of Tracy’s Testament, in Doctrinal Treatises, ed. Henry Walter (London:Parker Society, 1848), p. 281.

56. Heiko A. Oberman, Luther: Man between God and the Devil (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1989), p. 147.

57. Martin Luther Works, vol. 32, Career of the Reformer, II, ed. George W. Forell(Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1958), pp. 95–98. I am indebted for thesereferences to Luther’s works to Debora Shuger.

58. Luther, Works, 32:95–98. For the outright denial of Purgatory, see “Ein Wider-ruf vom Fegfeuer,” in Martin Luthers Werke (Weimar: H. Bohlau, 1863–), vol. 20(1893), pt. 2, pp. 360 ff.

59. Thomas Wilcox, The Vnfouldyng of sundry vntruths and absurde propositions, latelyepropounded by one I. B. a great fauourer of the horrible Heresie of the Libertines (London,1581), fol. D6v. Wilcox (1549?–1608) was one of the authors of the Admonition,a major work of religious Nonconformity.

60. “Articles Untruly, Unjustly, Falsely, Uncharitably Imputed to Me” (probably1533, reprinted in Foxe), in Sermons and Remains, ed. George Elwes Corrie (Lon-don: Parker Society, 1845), pp. 236–38.

61. Hugh Latimer, Works, ed. George Elwes Corrie (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1844–1845), 1:305, 550.

62. William Tyndale, Obedience of a Christian Man, in Doctrinal Treatises, ed. HenryWalter (London: Parker Society, 1848), pp. 158–59.

63. Exposition of the First Epistle of St. John, in Expositions and Notes, ed. Henry Walter(London: Parker Society, 1849), p. 162.

64. William Tyndale, An Answer to Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue (Cambridge: ParkerSociety, 1850), p. 143.

65. R[ichard]C[orbett], The Times’ Whistle, ed. J. C. Cowper, Early English TextSociety, o.s., 48 (London: Trubner, 1871), p. 13:


Your holy water, purgatorie, bulles,Wherwith you make the common people gulles,Are grosse abuses of phantastique brainesSubtillie devisd’e only for private gaines,Which you pull from the simple as you list,Keeping them blinded in black errours mist;And from the truth doe lead them clean astray,Whilst of their substance you doe make your prey.You false impostors of blinde ignorance,Think you to ’scape eternall vengeance?’Tis not your Popes fond dispensation,Your workes of supererrogation,Your idle crossings, or your wearing haireNext to your skin, or all your whipping-cheer,Your praiers & pilgrimage to Saints, your pixes,Your holy reliques, beads, & crucifixes,Your masses, Ave Maries, images,Dirges, & such like idle fantasiesOf superstitiously polluted Rome,Can save your soules in that great day of doome.

(Lines 319–38)

66. Wilcox, The Vnfouldyng, fol. D6v. See, likewise, Edwin Sandys (1574): “[T]obelieve in Purgatory is vain, perilous, injurious”; Robert Pricke (in a funeralsermon, 1608): “[T]he soul after death . . . doth not wander up and down fromplace to place nor yet remaineth in a third place, as papists and pagans havedreamed . . . but . . . it returneth unto God that gave”; the merchant James Cole(1629): “[C]oncerning a mid-way mansion, or fiery prison, which some haveendeavoured to settle by the way, there to purge and purify the blessed soulssome certain years before their ascension in to Heaven, we find nothing at allin holy writ” (all quoted in Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, pp. 386–87).

67. John Veron, The Hunting of Purgatorye to Death (1561; STC 24683), fol. 199v.The license has certain constraints, as we later learn in a discussion of paganliterature. “For, as paynters be wont to set foorthe their pictures after ye fasshion,that thei see men to wear their garmentes, and to decke themselves,” declaresVeron’s character Eutrapelus, “so Poetes do ymagine their fictions, and do in-uente theyr fables, vpoon the thinges ye be vsed emonge men: or elles vponthose thinges yt they haue some opinion/ of” (fol. 274r–v).

68. A Cvrry-Combe for a Coxe-combe. Or Pvrgatories Knell. In ansder of a lewd Libell latelyforicated by Iabal Rachil against Sir Edw. Hobies Covnter-snarle: Entituled Purgatoriestriumph ouer Hell. Digested in forme of a Dialogue by Nick-groome of the Hobie-Stable Reginoburgi [Queenborough] (London: William Stansby, 1615), p. 53.In the work to which Hoby is replying, Pvrgatories Trivmph Over Hell, Maugre Thebarking of Cerberus in Syr Edward Hobyes Counter-snarle (n.p., 1613), the authorhad responded to an earlier charge against his using metaphors in a theologicalargument: “Are not the Psalmes of Dauid the chiefest hymnes of God his


Church? and are not those Poemes full of figuratiue speaches . . . ? why thenmay not a Theologicall inuocation be vttered in a figuratiue speach?

69. William Fulke, Two Treatises Written against the Papistes, The one being an answereof the Christian Protestant to the Proud challenge of a Popish Catholicke: The other Acofutation of the Popish Churches doctrine touching Purgatory & prayers for the dead(London, 1577), pp. 175, 62–63.

70. John Milton, Paradise Lost, in The Poems of John Milton, ed. John Carey andAlastair Fowler (London: Longman, 1968). Quotations from Milton are to thisedition.

71. The “now” in this passage must refer to the time depicted at this point in thepoem, before Adam and Eve have fallen and hence before the rise of lunaticsuperstitions Milton mocks. In a sonnet in praise of Henry Lawes, Milton refersto Purgatory, but it is Dante’s Purgatory—that is, a poetic conceit:

Harry whose tuneful and well-measured songFirst taught our English music how to spanWords with just note and accent, not to scanWith Midas’ ears, committing short and long;

Thy worth and skill exempts thee from the throng,With praise enough for envy to look wan;To after age thou shalt be writ the man,That with smooth air couldst humour best our tongue.

Thou honour’st verse, and verse must lend her wingTo honour thee, the priest of Phoebus’ choirThat tun’st their happiest lines in hymn, or story.

Dante shall give fame leave to set thee higherThan his Casella, whom he wooed to singMet in the milder shades of Purgatory.

( John Milton, “Sonnet XIII: To Mr. H. Lawes, on his Airs,” in Works, ed. FrankPatterson, et al. [New York: Columbia University Press, 1931], 1:63.)

Unlike Fulke or Wilcox, Milton cannot hold that the imagination is inevitablyfictive and empty, since he himself imagines Hell and Heaven in such detail,but he defends his own imaginings by appealing to the inspiration of the HolySpirit.

72. John Frith, A Disputation of Purgatory (answer to Rastell, More, and Rochester).In The Works of the English Reformers: William Tyndale and John Frith, ed. ThomasRussell, 3 vols. (London: Ebenezer Palmer, 1831), 3:89–90, 97, 183.

73. William Camden, Britain, or a Chorographicall Description of . . . England, Scot-land, and Ireland, trans. Philemon Holland (London, 1610), p. 163. The statis-tics first appear in the 1607 Latin edition. For modern estimates, see especiallyKreider, English Chantries.

74. J. J. Scarisbrick writes, “Chantries and guilds were suppressed, but on thewhole their schools and hospitals survived. The act of 1547 was aimed againsttheir religious functions, not their good works, and the commissioners sent outto implement the statute of suppression acted conscientiously. . . . For example,


the crown separated out and continued to pay the sum of £6.10s.6d. to the poorof Cambridge, in accordance with the founder’s wishes, from the income of aformer obit; the remainder of the endowment (from shops and booths) wasforfeit because it supported prayer for the dead” (in The Reformation and theEnglish People [Oxford: Blackwell, 1984], 112–13).

75. John Donne, Devotions on Emergent Occasions, together with Death’s Duel (AnnArbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959), p. 18.

76. For distinctions among the genres of medieval accounts of apparations—mira-cula, mirabilia, exempla, opuscules coming out of the discretio spirituum—each ofwhich serves a somewhat different purpose and addresses a different textualcommunity, see Jean-Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living andthe Dead in Medieval Society, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1998), esp. pp. 123 ff.

77. On the appearance of ghosts at midnight, see Noel Taillepied, A Treatise ofGhosts (1588), trans. Montague Summers (London: Fortune Press, 1933), pp.97–98: “In all ages throughout history has it been recorded that disembodiedSpirits have appeared, as well by day as night, but more often about midnightwhen a man wakes from his first sleep, and the sense are alert, having takensome repose.”

78. Elegy VI (“Oh, let me not serve so, as those men serve”) in John Donne, TheComplete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (Middlesex: Penguin, 1971), pp. 101–2.

79. Donne, Devotions, p. 74.

80. Ibid., pp. 137–38.

81. Ibid., p. 109.

82. James Pilkington, bishop of Durham from 1561 to 1576, wrote rules for funer-als (published posthumously in 1585) in which he insisted “that no superstitionshould be committed in them, wherein the papists infinitely offend; as inmasses, dirges, trentals, singing, ringing, holy water, hallowed places, year’s daysand month-minds, crosses, pardon letters to be buried with them, mourners, deprofundis by every lad that could say it, dealing of money solemnly for the dead,watching of the corpse, bell and banner, with many more that I could reckon”(quoted in David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and theLife-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England [New York: Oxford University Press, 1997],p. 399).

In his Funeral Sermon for the Emperor Ferdinand, Edmund Grindal reflectson whether and how it is appropriate to remember the dead. An honorablememorial, he observes, is quite distinct from prayers for the soul of the dead.Such prayers are not mentioned in the canonical Scriptures and have, since thetime of Gregory the Great, been maintained “principally by feigned apparitions,visions of spirits, and other like fables, contrary to the scriptures” (EdmundGrindal, Remains [Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1843], p. 24). Thereis no “third place”—only Heaven and Hell, where prayers are strictly irrelevant.(In those places, “it needeth not or booteth not, as the old proverb goeth” [25].)But Grindal has to account for the existence of prayers for the dead in the works

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of the ancient fathers: “If the ancient fathers therefore, when they pray for thedead, mean of the dead which are already in heaven, and not elsewhere; thenmust we needs by their prayer understand either thanksgiving, or else take suchpetitions for the dead, (as they be indeed in some places,) for figures of elo-quence and exornation of their style and oration, rather than necessary groundsof reason of any doctrine” (25). This is a clear and extremely revealing expres-sion of the role that rhetoric, and particularly figuration (including personifica-tion), is made to play in Protestant discourse. What is at stake here? A shift incategorical understanding, so that what appears to be straightforward (andhence “necessary” in the sense of doctrinal), becomes figurative and ornamen-tal, a piece of art rather than belief. In Grindal’s instructions for visitations, heis intensely concerned about the way the bell is tolled.

83. Donne makes the point explicitly in his final sermon, “Death’s Duell”: “forthis whole world is but an universal churchyard, but our common grave, andthe life and motion that the greatest persons have in it is but as the shaking ofburied bodies in their grave, by an earthquake” (Devotions, 171).

84. Donne, Devotions, p. 141.

85. Izaak Walton, The Lives of Dr. John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Mr. Richard Hooker,Mr. George Herbert (1670) (Menston, England: Scolar Press, 1969), p. 71.

86. Donne, Devotions, pp. 176, 180.

87. The Sermons of John Donne, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson and George R. Potter, 10vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1954), 7:167–68.

88. “For of that which Virgil sayes of Purgatory, Lactantius sayes, propemodum vera,Virgil was very neere the truth, Virgil was almost a Catholique.” In John Donne,“Sermon Preached at S. Pauls, May 21, 1626” (on text: 1 Cor. 15:29: “Else, whatshall they doe which are baptized for the dead? If the dead rise not at all, whyare they then baptized for the dead?” [Simpson and Potter, Sermons, 7:176–77]).

CHAPTER TWO: IMAGINING PURGATORY

1. The New Science of Giambattista Vico (3d ed. [1744]), trans. Thomas GoddardBergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), p. 21.All citations are to this edition.

2. These are the titles of polemics exchanged between the Jesuit John Floyd andthe Protestant Edward Hoby.

3. The panel, by the Meister des Palant-Alters, is reproduced in the useful catalogHimmel, Holle, Fegefeuer: Das Jenseits im Mittelalter, ed. Peter Jezler (Zurich: Schwei-zerisches Landesmuseum, 1994), p. 284.

4. In the First Quarto, Horatio does not utter this celebrated farewell, but thedying Hamlet’s last words are a prayer: “Farewel Horatio, heauen receiue mysoule.” See The Three-Text Hamlet, ed. Paul Bertram and Bernice W. Kliman (NewYork: AMS Press, 1961), Q1: line 2196.

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5. Meister des Lebensbrunnes (Messe des Heiligen Gregors, ca. 1510), repro-duced in Jezler, Himmel, Holle, Fegefeuer, p. 295 and detail, p. 293.

6. Takami Matsuda, Death and Purgatory in Middle English Didactic Poetry (Cam-bridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), p. 107. “The general reticence about the details ofpunishment creates an impression of Purgatory as a place of mercy and hoperather than of punishment” (107). The wealth of evidence assembled by PeterJezler (Himmel, Holle, Fegefeuer) and by Christine Gottler (Die Kunst des Fegefeuersnach der Reformation: Kirchliche Schenkungen, Ablass und Almosen in Antwerpen undBologna um 1600 [Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1996]) partially, but only partially,bears out this claim.

7. “Of ıe relefyng of saules in purgatory,” British Library MS Additional 37049,fol. 24v, in Matsuda, Death and Purgatory in Middle English Didactic Poetry, p. 155.

8. R. W. (fl. 1570), A recantation of famous Pasquin of Rome (London: John Daye,1570), lines 738–39.

9. William Tyndale, Obedience of a Christian Man, in Doctrinal Treatises, ed. HenryWalter (London: Parker Society, 1848), p. 329.

10. John Veron, The Hunting of Purgatorye to Death (1561; STC 24683), fol. 178r.

11. On the role of vision narratives in helping “to create a solid, spatial image ofthe otherworld which was easy to understand and easy for preachers to repre-sent,” see Carl Watkins, “Doctrine, Politics and Purgation: The Vision of Tnuth-gal and the Vision of Owein at St Patrick’s Purgatory,” Journal of Medical History22 (1996): 234.

12. Brother Marcus, The Vision of Tnugdal, trans. Jean-Michel Picard (Dublin:Fourt Courts Press, 1989), p. 141.

13. Ibid., p. 142.

14. “Of a vision which was seen by a certain monk, of Purgatory and the places ofpunishment,” in Roger of Wendover (d. 1236), Flowers of History, ed. J. A. Giles(London: Bohn, 1849), pp. 154–56. For the source, see Herbert Thurston, “Vi-sion monaci de Eynsham,” Analecta Bollandiana 22 (1903): 225–319. For thefirst printed version (William de Machlinia, ca. 1482), see The Revelation to theMonk of Evesham (1196), ed. Edward Arber, English Reprints 18 (London: En-glish Reprints, 1869).

15. “The Vision of Thurkill,” ed. H.L.D. Ward, Journal of the British ArchaeologicalAssociation 31 (1875): 433. Latin text in Die Vision des Bauern Thurkill, ed. PaulGerhard Schmidt (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1987). The vision dates from ca.1206, and its preface acknowledges its links to the Tractatus Sancti Patricii andto the visions of Tondal and the Monk of Evesham. On the status of the theaterimage in this text, see Roger S. Loomis and Gustave Cohen, “Were There The-atres in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries?” Speculum 20 (1945): 92–98, andthe responses by Dino Bigongiari, “Were There Theatres in the Twelfth andThirteenth Centuries?” Romanic Review 37 (1946): 201–4; and Mary H. Mar-shall, “Theatre in the Middle Ages: Evidence from Dictionaries and Glosses,”


Symposium 4 (1950): 1–39, 366–89. I have profited from an unpublished essayby Henry S. Turner, “Narrare Seriatim: Representing Otherworld Space in theVisio Thurkilli (1206).”

16. “The Vision of Thurkill,” p. 433.

17. Ibid., p. 434.

18. “Ita plane quamuis salui per ignem, gravior tamen erit ille ignis, quam quid-quid potest homo pati in hac vita” (Enarrationes in Psalmos 38.3, Corpus Christian-orum Latinorum, 38.384; quoted in Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans.Arthur Goldhammer [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981], p. 384 n.31). The fire, theologians wrote, is “intelligent.” It will, as a seventeenth-centuryItalian Jesuit wrote, “extend its search even to sins already confessed, alreadypardoned, in order to remove, expiate, and efface the least vestiges of them,the tiniest remnants, the slightest blemishes” (Paolo Segneri the Elder, quotedin Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, Thir-teenth–Eighteenth Centuries (orig. French ed. 1983), trans. Eric Nicholson (NewYork: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), p. 392.

19. Richard Rolle, “To live well, consider Hell, Purgatory, Heaven, [etc.],” in York-shire Writers: Richard Rolle and His Followers (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1896),lines 163–68.

20. James Mumford, A Remembrance for the Living to Pray for the Dead ([St. Omer],1641), pp. 38–39.

21. Ibid., p. 40. Mumford takes his image of the painted fire, as he acknowledges,from “our worthy Countrey-man Syr Thomas More in the end of his rare workecalled, The supplication of the Soule.”

22. Alonso de Orozco, Victoria de la muerte, cited in Carlos Eire, From Madrid toPurgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1995), p. 174.

23. Fulvio Fontana, cited in Delumeau, Sin and Fear, p. 396. On Gregory XIII andthe establishment of altars privileged for the dead, see, especially, Gottler, DieKunst des Fegefeuers, esp. pp. 66–88.

24. On the “bodily semblance,” see Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, pp. 6, 98, 266,passim. The idea that mortal suffering anticipates and pays the debt of sufferingafter death is found outside of the Christian tradition in the Palestinian Talmud,in the story of a pious man from Ashkelon. The story is retold in a midrash fromDarkhei Teshuvah, “The Ways of Repentance,” an appendix to the responsa ofMeir of Rothenburg, a thirteenth-century rabbi. “When both an unworthy taxcollector and the man of Ashkelon’s pious companion in study die on the sameday, the man of Ashkelon is troubled by the contrast between the elaboratemourning for the tax collector and the lack of attention to the death of hisfriend until it is revealed to him in a dream that both the tax collector and hisfriend have received their just deserts.

His friend had sinned a single sin in his life: he had once put on the phylacter-ies for the head before the phylacteries for the arm. Thus he dies unmourned.


The tax collector in his life had done one good deed, a charitable act of feedingthe poor. Thus he receives a splendid funeral. In his dream theman of Ashkelonsees his friend strolling in the midst of ‘gardens and orchards and fountains,’while the tax collector, his tongue stretched out over the river, tries unsuccess-fully to drink from it.”

The principle, as Martha Himmelfarb (whose version of the story I havequoted) explains, is this: in this world the righteous are punished for every sinthey commit so that they may enjoy more completely the bliss of the world tocome. The wicked, on the other hand, receive any reward due them in thisworld so that they may be more completely punished in the world to come.Martha Himmelfarb, Tours of Hell: An Apocalyptic Form in Jewish and ChristianLiterature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), pp. 29–30.

It is difficult to know how seriously to take this story, since if it were treatedwith some literalness it would imply that anyone we see who is successful andhonored in this world is likely to be facing a ghastly end in the afterlife, andanyone we see despised here is likely to be honored later.

25. Cursor Mundi [Northumbrian, fourteenth-century], ed. RichardMorris, 3 vols.Early English Text Society, o.s. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.,1877, 1878, 1892), 3:1575:

Forthi to man it es grete watch,And vnto preste that schriues bath;For in his boke saint austyn sais,That he the prest that penance layesBe vnwise in his fiting,Or else the synful in his telling,Ather of tham for thaire folySall brin in fire of Purgatory,And mak amendes thare for the plight,That tham aw here to do right. . . .

26. Thomas Tuke, A Discovrse of Death, Bodily, Ghostly, and Eternall: Nor Vnfit forSovldiers Warring, Seamen sayling, Strangers trauelling, Women bearing, nor any otherliuing that thinkes of Dying (London, 1613), fol. A3r.

27. Richard Rolle, Prose and Verse, ed. S. J. Ogilvie-Thomson, Early English TextSociety, o.s., 293 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 73. On Purgatoryin this world and the “pragmatic prudence” with which the faithful were urgedto seek it, see Matsuda, Death and Purgatory in Middle English Didactic Poetry, esp.pp. 167 ff. See Henry W. Sullivan, Grotesque Purgatory: A Study of Cervantes’s “DonQuixote,” Part II (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996),who seems to think that the notion of Purgatory on earth was only fully formu-lated in the seventeenth century, under the influence of Jesuits and the Counter-Reformation.

28. Henry Jones (bishop of Clogher), Saint Patricks Purgatory: Containing The De-scription, Originall, Progresse, and Demolition of that superstitious place (London,1647), p. 59. Educated at Trinity, Dublin, Jones (1605–1682) was active in pro-


curing evidence as to the existence of a popish plot in Ireland. Two of his threechildren became Catholics.

29. “Forthi, if we couait to fle the payn of Helle and the payn of purgatorie vsbihoueth restreyne vs perfitly fro the lustes and the lykinges and fro the il delitesand the wicked drede of this life, and that worldis sorowe be nat in vs, bot thatwe hold al oure herte fast on Ihesu Criste, and stand manly agayns temptaci-ouns” (Ego Dormio, in Rolle, Prose and Verse, p. 32 (lines 260–64).

30. Etienne de Bourbon, mid-thirteenth-century Tractatus de diversis materiis praedi-cabilibus, writes in a discussion of Purgatory of “the gift of fear” (De dono timoris).Cited, with many other examples, in Delumeau, Sin and Fear, p. 385.

31. Jane Owen, An Antidote Against Purgatory (1634). Facsimile in English RecusantLiterature, ed. D. M. Rogers (Menston, Yorkshire: Scolar Press, 1973), vol. 166.Cf. the brief discussion of Owen in Sullivan, Grotesque Purgatory, pp. 97–98.

32. Owen, An Antidote Against Purgatory, pp. 239–40.

33. Ibid., p. 105. This argument seems to have been current in Jesuit preachingfrom the period. See, for example, Philippe d’Outreman, Le Pedagogue chretien(Saint Omer, 1622): “Among the legacies that you arrange for your nearest anddearest, do not forget yourself, that is, remember to also leave something sothat masses may be said for the eternal rest of your soul. For it is not right thatyour children, relatives, and friends should have the support and benefit ofyour wealth, while you would be burning for ten, twenty, thirty, and fifty yearsin the unspeakably raging fire of Purgatory” (quoted in Delumeau, Sin and Fear,p. 398).

34. Owen, An Antidote Against Purgatory, pp. 183, 160–61.

35. Anticipating a reward for killing Hotspur, as he fraudulently claims to havedone, Falstaff imagines himself repenting: “If I do grow great, I’ll grow less, forI’ll purge, and leave sack, and live cleanly as a nobleman should do” (5.4.162–65). Perhaps that fantasy of purgation stuck in Jane Owen’s mind, or alterna-tively she recalled that Falstaff likens Bardolph’s red nose to a memento mori: “Inever see thy face but I think about Hell-fire, and Dives that lived in purple: forthere he is in his robes, burning, burning” (3.3.29–32).

36. On voyages to the otherworld, see Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, and ClaudeCarozzi, Le Voyage de l’ame dans l’Au-Dela (Rome: Ecole Francaise de Rome,1994). On the reviving of those who had died, see the remark of the CatholicJane Owen, An Antidote Against Purgatory: “And because, there aremany men, who can hardly be induced to belieue any thing, which them-selues haue not seene, God sometimes therefore hath vouchsafed, to raise cer-tain persons from death to lyfe; commanding them to relate to others liuing,what themselues touching this payne haue seene.” These are, Owen writes, “eye-witnesses” (31).

37. Shane Leslie, comp., Saint Patrick’s Purgatory: A Record from History and Literature(London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1932), p. xix.


38. The author gives only his initial, “H,” which was expanded in the thirteenthcentury, by Matthew Paris, to “Henricus.”

39. Thus it appears in the Cistercian Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogus miracu-lorum (1219–1223), among many purgatorial exempla. “Let him who doubtsthe existence of Purgatory go to Ireland,” Caesarius writes, “and let him enterinto Saint Patrick’s Purgatory. He will then have no more doubts about thereality of Purgatorial punishments” (quoted in Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory,p. 309).

40. Michael Haren and Yolande de Pontfarcy, eds., The Medieval Pilgrimage to St.Patrick’s Purgatory: Lough Derg and the European Tradition (Enniskillen: ClogherHistorical Society, 1988).

41. See the map in ibid., p. 49.

42. Leslie, Saint Patrick’s Purgatory, p. xvii; quoted, among other places, in St. Pat-rick’s Purgatory: Two versions of Owayne Miles and The Vision of William of Stranton,together with the long text of the Tractatus de Purgatorio Sancti Patricii, ed. RobertEasting, Early English Text Society, o.s., 298 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1991), xvii. All citations of Owayne Miles are to Easting, St. Patrick’s Purgatory.Owayne Miles survives in two distinct versions, one in six-line tail-rhyme stanzas(aabccb) and the other in octosyllabic couplets. The first version is extant in asingle copy, the Auchinleck manuscript; the second survives in two copies, Cot-ton (BLMS Cotton Caligula A ii) and Yale (MS 365). Easting prints Auchinleck,Cotton, and Yale. Quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from the Auchinleckversion.

43. This is the central claim of Le Goff, who writes that “this brief work occupiesan essential place in the history of Purgatory, in whose success it played an im-portant, if not decisive, role” (The Birth of Purgatory, p. 193).

44. Leslie, Saint Patrick’s Purgatory, p. 45.

45. Pedro Calderon de la Barca, El Purgatorio de San Patricio (ca. 1634; originallypublished 1636), ed. J. M. Ruano de la Raza (Liverpool: Liverpool Univer-sity Press, 1988). See other Spanish texts, summarized in Sullivan, GrotesquePurgatory.

46. Cotton manuscript, lines 37–44. Note the alternative reading of the secondline, in the Yale manuscript: “As it is written in the story” (Easting, St. Patrick’sPurgatory, pp. 38–39).

In Marie de France’s version, the skeptics ask to see the joys as well asthe pains:

Quant seinz Patriz aveit parlea cele gent, e demustrede Deu la grant puissance veire,n’i aveit nul ki volsist creires’il ne mustrast certeinementqu’il veıssent apertement:les joies dunt il a mustree les peines dunt a parle.


(Marie de France, Saint Patrick’s Purgatory: A Poem, ed. and trans. Michael J.Curley [Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1993], lines265–72).

47. Charlotte d’Evelyn and Anna J. Mill, eds., The South English Legendary, EarlyEnglish Text Society, o.s., 235 (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), lines45 ff. Jones notes wryly a parallel with Ulysses, who in legend had created a caveby tracing it with his sword (Saint Patricks Purgatory, p. 44). Easting notes (St.Patrick’s Purgatory, p. 196) that the staff was a prized relic—it is mentioned assuch in the Auchinleck MS—but was publicly burned in Dublin in 1538.

48. In other accounts Owein was born in Ireland, which he had left in order tofollow King Stephen of England to war.

49. Thomas McAlindon, “Comedy and Terror in Middle English Literature: TheDiabolical Game,” Modern Language Review 60 (1965): 323–32.

50. Himmelfarb, Tours of Hell.

51. The otherworld is, as Aron Gurevich observes, “an aggregate of disconnectedplaces (hills, valleys, swamps, pits, buildings, etc.); they are divided by unex-plained voids unevenly surmounted in the narrative” (Aron Gurevich, MedievalPopular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception, ed. Peter Burke and Ruth Fin-negan, trans. Janos M. Bak and Paul A. Hollingsworth, Cambridge Studies in Oraland Literate Culture, vol. 14, [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988]).

52. In Matthew Paris’s account Owein returns to be a monk and interpreter inthe Lough Derg abbey.

53. “Quae sunt qui dicunt quod Aulam ingressus in extasin fuerat raptus, & haecomnia in spiritu viderat quod nequaquam contigisse, Miles certissime affirmat,sed corporeis occulis se omnia vidide & corporaliter pertulisse constantissimetestatur” (trans. Jones, Saint Patricks Purgatory, p. 85). There are equivalent pas-sages in the Owayne Miles: the demons tell that knight that he “was comen withflesche and fel / To fechen him the ioie of Helle” (54.4–5), and “He was deli-uerd from the fendes turment, / Quic man into that plas” (139.5–6).

54. Roger of Wendover, Flowers of History, trans. J. A. Giles, quoted in Robert East-ing, “The English Tradition,“ in Haren and de Pontfarcy, TheMedieval Pilgrimage,p. 61.

55. In the other extant text, the date, given with equal specificity, is Friday, Sep-tember 20, 1409. “The Vision ofWilliam Stranton,” in Easting, St. Patrick’s Purga-tory, pp. 78–79. Easting prints two fifteenth-century texts of this vision, BL MSRoyal 17 B xliii and BL MS Additional 34.193. Unless otherwise noted, I citeAdditional.

56. The contrast here is with Owein, about whom we are told only that he seessome of his acquaintance.

57. “Telle also for the bet, / Matrymony yet thow haue let” (John Mirk, Instructionsfor Parish Priests, ed. Edward Peacock, 2d ed., Early English Text Society, o.s., 31[London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1868, rev. 1902], lines 1381–82).

58. “The Vision of William Stranton,” in Easting, St. Patrick’s Purgatory, p. 101.


59. William repeatedly has the experience of forgetting his prayers, during mo-ments of terror, and then, recalled to the right way to deal with the challenge,he “marks” himself with his prayers. In a fusion of word and sign, “mark” herehas the force of making the sign of the cross on one’s forehead. See the Italianpilgrim to Saint Patrick’s Purgatory, Antonio Mannini, in 1411: “The bearerof this will tell you how I came out marked, for I shewed him that he mighttell you; perhaps I shall bear the mark for ever” (Leslie, Saint Patrick’s Purgatory,p. 39).

60. In Grotesque Purgatory, Sullivan claims that the Tractatus had at least an in-direct influence on a literary work far greater than any of these: Cervantes’ DonQuixote.

61. According to Le Goff, “Purgatory did not exist before 1170 at the earliest”(The Birth of Purgatory, p. 135; cf. also pp. 149, 163).

62. Indeed, as Le Goff remarks, “the success of Purgatory was contemporary withthe rise of the narrative” (ibid., p. 291). The historian is speaking here not ofsuch works as Saint Patrick’s Purgatory but of the principle of narrative itself as itis manifested in a theological doctrine that assumes a succession of individualexperiences in time. Purgatory, he argues, “introduced a plot into the story ofindividual salvation. Most important of all, the plot continued after death”(292). For souls in Heaven and Hell there is no narrative, properly speaking,since they no longer exist in time but have been translated into eternity. Bycontrast, with its graded process of punishments and cleansing, its story of prog-ress toward salvation, its “temporary fire,” Purgatory virtually requires a narra-tive account of the soul’s fate in the afterlife. The phrase “temporary fire” comesfrom the pontifical definition of 1254, which Le Goff calls “the birth certificateof Purgatory as a doctrinally defined place” (284).

63. Cotton MS in Easting, St. Patrick’s Purgatory, lines 57–64.

64. See Easting, St. Patrick’s Purgatory, p. 196n. Cf. J. Healy, The Life and Writings ofSt. Patrick (Dublin, 1905), pp. 633–36.

65. Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1999),p. 16.

66. On the ways in which space was constituted in the Middle Ages, see PaulZumthor, La Mesure du monde: Representation de l’espace au Moyen Age (Paris: Seuil,1993).

67. “Through a mimesis of givenness,” writes Elaine Scarry, “the quality of instruc-tion in a poem of prose narrative brings about a radical change from day-dreaming to vivid image-making” (Dreaming by the Book, p. 31). “Givenness” hereis nothing more or less than the ordinary condition of perception: we do notlook about us at the world with a sense that we are free to make up what we areperceiving. Writers produce this effect of perception, Scarry argues, by sup-pressing an awareness of volition, directing the movements of the mind, provid-ing detailed instructions for what you are to imagine that you see. “The ‘instruc-tional’ character is key, because it allows the image to seem to come into beingby an agency not one’s own” (244).


68. Kircher’s device turns Scarry’s example of the magic lantern, meant only toaffirm the reality of the underlying wall, inside out: the wall is mere dross, butthe reality is the burning soul. Still, Scarry’s analysis of perceptual mimesis mayhelp us to grasp the principle here. Why, she asks, “when the lights go out andthe storytelling begins, is the most compelling tale (most convincing, most be-lievable) a ghost story?” After all, she continues,

Since most of us have no experience of ghosts in the material world, thisshould be the tale we least easily believe. The answer is that the story in-structs its hearers to create an image whose own properties are secondnature to the imagination; it instructs its hearers to depict in the mindsomething thin, dry, filmy, two-dimensional, and without solidity. Hencethe imaginer’s conviction: we at once recognize, perhaps with amazement,that we are picturing, if not with vivacity, then with exquisite correctness,precisely the thing described. (Ibid., pp. 23–24)

From this perspective it may have been easier than we initially supposed to in-struct a large number of medieval people on how to imagine the afterlife. Theyhad only to take on faith, as it were, narrative’s default mode.

69. The promise, explicit in the South English Legendary version (d’Evelyn andMill,The South English Legendary), is repeatedly challenged. On Lough Derg as a pil-grimage site, see Haren and de Pontfarcy, The Medieval Pilgrimage; Jones, SaintPatricks Purgatory; Victor and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Cul-ture: Anthropological Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978).

70. Quoted by Jones, Saint Patricks Purgatory, p. 61.

71. “This place is called St. Patrick his Purgatory of the inhabitors,” Holinshedcontinues (Leslie, Saint Patrick’s Purgatory, p. 45).

72. Borrowed, as skeptics observed, from legends associated with Trophonius’scave; cf. Erasmus, quoted in Jones, Saint Patricks Purgatory, pp. 46 ff.


74. Sullivan: “The popularity of Patrick’s shrine withered with the Italian Renais-sance and, after a high-minded Dutch Augustinian protested the place’s blatanttraffic in sacred objects in 1494, the pit was broken up by edict of Pope Alexan-der VI in 1497” (Grotesque Purgatory, p. 71).

75. John of Trevisa translates a passage from Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon—“He telleth that who so suffereth the paines of that Purgatory, if it be enjoynedhim for penance, he shall never suffer the paines of Hell, but he shall die finallywithout repentance of sinne . . .” ( Jones, Saint Patricks Purgatory, p. 49)—andthen comments tartly, “But truly no man may be saved, but if he be very repen-tant whatsoever penance he doe. And every man that is very repentant at hislives end shall be sickerly saved, though he never heare of Saint Patricks Purga-tory” (cited in Easting, St. Patrick’s Purgatory, p. 197). The force of the popularidea is explained, at least by Jones, as a response to the inherent unfairness ofthe doctrine of suffrage, as favoring the rich (Jones, Saint Patricks Purgatory, pp.62–63).


284 N OT ES T O C H A P T ER T H RE E

77. Jones, Saint Patricks Purgatory, pp. 119–20.

78. The uneasiness does not only concern Saint Patrick’s Purgatory. In his collo-quy On Exorcism, More’s friend Erasmus provides a deeply skeptical analysis ofthe way in which eyewitness testimony of spiritual wonders is generated.

79. Leslie, Saint Patrick’s Purgatory, p. 43

80. Ibid., p. 45.

81. Veron, The Hunting of Purgatorye to Death, fols. 174v–175r.

82. Noel Taillepied, A Treatise of Ghosts, trans. Montague Summers (London: For-tune Press, 1588), 145.

83. Veron, The Hunting of Purgatorye to Death, fol. 175r.

84. Ibid., fols. 175v–176r.

85. Thomas Dekker, The Honest Whore, Part Two, in The Dramatic Works of ThomasDekker, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955),1.1.40–44. Dekker repeats the same feeble joke in The Welsh Embassador andrefers to Saint Patrick’s Purgatory again in Old Fortunatus.

86. Ralph Knevet, “Securitye,” in The Shorter Poems of Ralph Knevet, ed. Amy C.Charles (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1966), lines 7–12.

87. Jones, Saint Patricks Purgatory, p. 128.

88. Ibid., p. 129.

89. Ibid., pp. 133–34. For an attempt at remystification, see the account from theJesuit mission in Ireland, 1651—referring to the Parliamentary depradations:“The Franciscan Brethren were ejected, who had the care of the sacred place,and the crypt itself or Purgatory was defiled with muck that no insult might bemissing, and then filled in with earth and stones: all were smitten in their hinderparts and in a few days they had perished of dysentery and the foulest flux”(Leslie, Saint Patrick’s Purgatory, p. 103).

CHAPTER THREE: THE RIGHTS OF MEMORY

1. On ghosts, see Jean-Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and theDead in Medieval Society, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1998). Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a WesternGuilt Culture, Thirteenth–Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Eric Nicholson (New York: St.Martin’s Press, 1990), p. 37, quotes a sonnet entitled “Des esprits des morts,”composed by Ronsard’s secretary, Amadis Jamyns (1540–1593):

The Shadows, the Spirits, the ghastly ImagesOf the Dead, burdened with sins, wander in the night:And to show the grief and the evil that afflict themThey make the silence moan with their long and piteous voicesFor they are deprived of the rapturous delightsWhich attend the soul, after death, in Paradise,Banished from the day, they make noise in the shadows,Begging for help for their shameful sufferings.

285N OT ES T O C H A P T ER T H RE E

2. See Thomas Hohmann, ed., Heinrichs von Langenstein “Unterscheidung derGeister”: Lateinisch (De discretione spirituum) und deutsch (Munich: Artemis Verlag,1977), and Paschal Boland, The Concept of “Discretio Spirituum” in John Gerson’s“De probatione spirituum” and “De distinctione verarum visionum a falsis” (Washing-ton: Catholic University of America Press, 1959).

3. Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, p. 158.

4. Ibid., p. 224.

5. Ibid., p. 136.

6. Jacques Chiffoleau, La Comptabilite de l’Au-Dela: Les hommes, la mort et la religiondans la region d’Avignon a la fin duMoyen Age (vers 1320–vers 1480), vol. 47, Collec-tion de l’Ecole Francaise de Rome (Rome: Ecole Francaise de Rome, 1980).

7. Jean Gobi, Dialogue avec un Fantome, ed. and trans. Marie-Anne Polo de Beaulieu(Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1994), pp. 36, 68. For a detailed analysis of the earlytransmission and elaboration of the report, see Marie Anne Polo de Beaulieu,“De la Rumeur aux Textes: Echos de l’apparition du revenant d’Ales (apres1323),” in La Circulation des Nouvelles au Moyen Age, XXIVe Congres de laS.H.M.E.S., juin 1993 (Avignon, Serie Histoire Ancienne et Medievale—29 /Collection de l’Ecole Francaise de Rome—190), (Paris: Sorbonne, 1994), pp.129–56.

8. In Gobi, Dialogue avec un Fantome, Beaulieu observes that the mention of themayor of Ales, along with other details added to the original first-person deposi-tion, indicates the presence of another, second author of the longer treatise,one who was unfamiliar with the town and the region (for, among other things,Ales had no mayor). The evidence for Italian authorship of the longer treatiseis the insertion of two prominent mentions of Bologna in the ghost’s responses.

9. Both English texts report that the noises continued for eighteen days, but theLatin versions both of Jean Gobi’s deposition and of the treatise specify eightdays. Guido of Alet, The Gast of Gy, Eine englische Dichtung des 14. Jahrhunderts,ed. Gustav Schleich, in Palaestra, ed. Alois Brandl and Erich Schmidt (Berlin:Mayer & Muller, 1898). All quotations from the verse The Gast of Gy are to thistext. All quotations from the Middle English prose version are to Guido of Alet,The Gast of Gy: A Middle-English Religious Prose Tract Preserved in Queen’s College,Oxford, MS. 383, ed. R. H. Bowers, in Beitrage zur Englischen Philologie (Leipzig:Bernhard Tauchwitz, 1938).

10. In the verse version, the widow hopes it is her husband’s ghost, since whoeverit is is haunting her bed:

And how scho hoped ryght wyterly,It was ıe gast of hir lord Gy;For in ıat chaumbre oft herd was he,Whare hir lord was wont to be;To spyll ıat bed wald he noght blyn,Ùat Gy, hir lord, and scho lay in.

(Lines 71–76)


11. The verse version uses similar language. The prior obtains armed men to ac-company him

To Gy hows, ıat was newly dede,To se ıa wonders in ıat stede.

(Lines 123–24)

The sight of the widow writhing in anguish is terrible,

Bot neuer ıe less all men, ıat myght,Assembled for to se ıat syghtAnd persued vnto ıat place;For ıai wald witt ıat wonder case.

(Lines 1357–60)

12. “In the yere of his incarnacioun a Ml.CCC.xxx. and iij. wolde shewe siche anvntgaliliche) myracle thurg his ordynaunce. so that we miyt haue gretter certeynof the lyf that is to come” (18). The reference to Augustine is to the Liber de fidead Petrum; the actual source of the definition is De credendi utilitate.

13. Cf. the similar paradox in the verse version:

“Dame,“ he said, “ne dred ıe noght,For out of bale ıou sall be broght;And haue na meruail in ıi myndeOf cases, ıat falles omang mankynde,Forwhi,” he said, “als kennes ıir clerkes,God is wonderfull in his werkes.”

(Lines 85–90)

The translations are attempting to render the similar paradox in the Latin: “Nonmireris de isto casu, quia dominus mirabilis eset in operibus suis” (De SpirituGuidonis, in Schleich, The Gast of Gy, 5n).

14. When ıe mayre had herd ıis thing,Twa hundreth men sone gert he bringAnd armed ıam fra top to taAnd bad ıam with ıe pryor ga:“And baynly do, what he will byd!”And, als he bad, ryght swa ıai dyd.

(Lines 129–34)

15. Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, pp. 147–48.

16. “The spirit of the young man from Apt of whom Gervase of Tilbury speakseven had the gift of ubiquity: at the same moment he appeared to a priest whowas taking a nap on the left bank of the Rhone, and to his young cousin inBeaucaire, on the right bank” (ibid., p. 179).

17. “And all, ıat ıan wald howsell take / He howsyld sone for godes sake” (lines143–44).

18. “For cristen saules both more and lesse” (line 140).

19. “And in his mynde ıan toke he Gy / And prayd for him full specially” (lines141–42).


20. “And the priour toke priuely with hym. ıat no man wiste; the box wiı goddisfleisch and his blood. and hongid hit priuely bifofe his breest vndir his scapello-rie als worschipfully as he mygt” (lines 47–50).

21. Ùe woman was full mased and mad,Scho trembyld ıan, so was scho rad;Vnto ıe bed sone scho him tald,Ùe care was at hir hert full cald;Bot in hir wa yhit als scho was,Scho said: “Sir pryor, or yhe pas,I pray yhow for ıe luf of meAnd als in dede of charyte,Ùat yhe wald byd som haly bedeAnd mak prayers in ıis stedeFor his saule, ıat noble man.”

(Lines 183–93)

22. A febyll voyce ıan might ıai kenAls of a child sayand: “Amen.”

(Lines 209–10)

23. “som gastly thing” (line 232)—“gastly” here probably has its current sense of“horrible,” as well as the sense of both “spiritual” (as opposed to material) andspectral.

24. “Whether ertow ane ill gast or a gud?” (line 237).

25. “I am a gud gast” (line 250).

26. “I am euyl for mine euil dede” (line 251).

27. “And y am a wickid goost. as vnto my wickid payne ıat y suffre” (line 87).

28. All payn es gud (ıat proue I ıe),Ùat ordaind es in gud degre

(Lines 259–60)

29. Ùe saules in hell may I noght se:I was neuer ıare ne neuer sall be;Ne in to heuen may I noght wyn,Till I be clensed clene of syn.

(Lines 437–40)

30. And I am sett for sertaine space,Till god will gyf me better grace,Ùus for my syns to suffer payne.

(Lines 489–91)

The fact that the ghost is condemned to suffer for a finite and not an eternalterm—a point resonant for an understanding of the ghost in Hamlet—is repeat-edly stressed in The Gast of Gy. Hence, for example, this way of characterizingpurgatorial spirits as temporarily “evil”:

And ıai er euell for certayne space,Ùat suffers payne in any place


For ıair syns, ıat es to say,Till tyme ıat ıai be wasted oway.

(Lines 393–96)

31. Ùarfor es no lyknes to tellBetwene me and ıe fendes in hell.

(Lines 523–24)

32. Ùe voyce answerd on ıis manereAnd said: “Ùare er purgatoryes sere:Ane es comon to mare and les,And departabill ane other es.”

(Lines 537–40)

The claim is reiterated later in the text, without a challenge, when the ghosttells the prior that after death a soul learns whether he is judged to Heaven, toHell or

To comon Purgatory, ıat es stabyll,Or vnto Purgatory departabyll.

(Lines 1563–64)

The notion of a double Purgatory is found as well in Richard Rolle’s The Prickeof Conscience:

Yhit says ıir grete clerkes namly,Ùat twa stedes er of purgatory;Ùe tane es comon, als yhe herd me telle,Ùat with-in erthe es, oboven helle;And ıe togher es speciele, thurgh grace,Ùat es oboven erthe, in sere place.For in ıe comon stede som er noght ay,Bot er here punyst, outher nyght or day,In sere stedes specialy in gast,Whar ıai haf synned in body mast.And ıat may be thurgh helpe and spedeOf prayer of frendes and almusdede,Til wham ıai ofte in gast apere,Thurgh speciel grace, in sere stedes here,For to hast ıair deliveranceOut of ıair payne and ıair penaunce,Ùat, als I ar sayde, gretely greves,And for warnyng of frendes ıat lyefes.

(Lines 2872–89)

Richard Rolle de Hampole, The Pricke of Conscience (Stimulus Conscientiae), ed.Richard Morris (Berlin: A. Asher & Co., 1863). I am grateful to Professor H. A.Kelly for calling this passage to my attention.

33. Quoted in Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 92.


34. There was a fundamental tension in the church’s position: on the one hand,medieval theologians wished to assert that all souls were purged in the prisonhouse of Purgatory; on the other hand, they wished to acknowledge and to layclaim to at least some of the many reports of ghosts who appeared on earth.Hence the latent contradiction in a conventional summary like that of NoelTaillepied, A Treatise of Ghosts (1588), trans. Montague Summers (London: For-tune Press, 1933). The great Schoolmen, Taillepied writes, “are unanimouslyagreed and plainly write that there are four places or states whereunto the soulsof men at death repair”: “Heaven, Hell, Limbo (for unbaptized infants), andPurgatory.” But a moment later, he adds: “Now besides this realm of Purgatoryit sometimes pleases the hidden counsels of God that for certain mysteriousreasons disembodied souls endure their Purgatory, either among mountains orin waters, or in valleys, or in houses, and particularly are they attached to thosespots where on earth they sinned and offended God” (147–48). Allusions to“hidden counsels” and “mysterious reasons” are almost always the mark of doc-trinal incoherence.

35. Chiffoleau characterizes Jean Gobi’s deposition as a “domestication” of thehaunting: “L’exorcisme recuperateur de Jean Gobi consiste a faire discourir lerevenant, a le changer en un esprit bavard et raisonneur” (La Comptabilite del’Au-Dela, p. 405). This taming of the wildness of the folkloric materials is cer-tainly present, and perhaps reinforced, in the longer version of the encounter,but the “domestic” has its own peculiar gravitational force, not entirely sweptup in the self-justifying rituals of the church.

36. The Virgin will speak to the demons, the Gast of Gy reports, in the followingterms:

“Mayden and moder both am IOf Jesu, my son, god allmyghty,And of heuen am I coround queneAnd lady of all ıe erth bidene,And I am emperys of hell,Whare yhe and other deuels dwell.

(Lines 715–20)

37. The ghost supports this claim with Jesus’ own words from Matt. 12:34:

If any man outher ald or yhingOf ane other suld ask a thing,What thing so lygges his hert most nere,Ùat in his speche sall fyrst appereAnd first be in his wordes allways;For god ıus in his gospell says:“Ex habundancia cordis os loquitur:Of ıe fulnes of ıe hertSpekes ıe mowth wordes smert.”

(Lines 825–33)

38. All if ıine office ordaind wareFor cristen saules, als ıou said are,


Ùou toke with gud deuociouneOf ıe haly gast ane orysoune,And ıat ilk orysoune, for certayne,Alegged me mare of my payneÙan all ıe other, ıat ıou sayd(For tyll all saules ıai war puruayd);And, sen ıat helped me all aneWele mare ıan ıe other ilk ane,Of ıe haly gast, I say, ıou sang:If ıou me wyte, ıou has ıe wrang.

(Lines 891–902)

39. The latter question was the object of considerable controversy during the pa-pacy of John XXII, and the ghost here is upholding the Dominican positionagainst that taken by the pope. See Bowers, The Gast of Gy, p. 26 n. 25, andSchleich, The Gast of Gy, p. 165, note to lines 769 ff.

40. It is noteworthy that both the prose and verse texts of The Gast of Gy leave outa feature, present in the deposition itself and in the expanded Latin treatise,that restores to the prior some of his tattered moral authority. The prior asks ifthe indulgences that he has acquired for the relief of his own postmortem suffer-ings are transferable; that is, can he voluntarily strip them from himself andconfer them upon the ghost? The ghost answers in the affirmative, whereuponthe prior makes him a generous gift of one entire year’s accumulated indul-gences. This pious act echoes that attributed to Christina of Saint-Trond inThomas de Cantimpre’s thirteenth-century Life of Christina the Astonishing. WhenLouis, count of Looz, died, Christina (1150–1224) obtained fromGod the rightto suffer in her own body half of the purgatorial torments that were due to him.“Having taken on these burdens,” we are told, “for a long time afterwards youmight have seen Christina in the middle of the night being tormented withburning smoke and at other times with freezing cold” (Thomas de Cantimpre,The Life of Christina the Astonishing, trans. Margot H. King, 2d ed. [Toronto: Pere-grina, 1999], p. 69). Cf. Robert S. Sweetman, “Thomas of Cantimpre, MulieresReligiosae and Purgatorial Piety: Hagiographical Vitae and the ‘BeguineVoice,’ ” in A Distinct Voice: Medieval Studies in Honor of Leonard E. Boyle O.P., ed.Jacqueline Brown and William P. Stoneman (Notre Dame, Ind.: University ofNotre Dame Press, 1997), pp. 606–28.

41. Bowers, The Gast of Gy, p. 15.

42. So Ragget, so Rencht, so elyng, so vuel,As hidous to bi-holden as helle-deuel;Mouth and Moose, Eres and Eyes,Fflaume al ful of furi liyes.

(Lines 63–66)

(Carl Horstmann, ed., The Minor Poems of the Vernon MS., Part 1, Early En-glish Text Society, o.s., 98 [London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1892], pp.260 ff.)

43. “a trewe trentel / Of ten cheef festes of al the yer” (ibid., lines 106–7).


44. The story seems to bear witness not only to the effectiveness of the trental butalso to the pope’s astounding holiness, since it apparently suffices to keep hismother from the eternal torment she would appear to deserve. For a variantthat does not concede so happy an outcome, see a Middle English sermon thattells the story of a priest who devoutly sings masses and does other good deedsfor seven years on behalf of the soul of his mother. One day, alone in churchand busy with his prayers, he greatly desires to know how his mother is faring,when suddenly a horrible, ugly shadow appears to him and says, “I am thi mo-dere, and I am perpetually dampned.” The priest asks, “Where be all the gooddeeds that thou did in thy life, and where is all the rewards of all the masses thatI sung for thee and other good deeds that I have done for thee?” The horriblefigure answers, “That thou dud for me, itt shall aveyll the sowles in purgatory, andther-fore thou shalte haue thin mede.” But for her they can do nothing becausein her youth she had committed adultery and then for shamehad never confessedher sin. (See Woodburn O. Ross, ed., Middle English Sermons, Early English TextSociety, o.s., 209 [London: Oxford University Press, 1940], p. 183.)

45. Cf. Taillepied, A Treatise of Ghosts: “A ghost will naturally, if it is possible, appearto the person whom he has most loved whilst on earth, since this person will bereadiest to carry out any behest or fulfill any wish then communicated by thedeparted” (95).

46. These feelings are resolved into a series of pious actions, culminating in thethree hundred masses that the widow arranges to be said on a single day for herhusband’s soul:

And, so when that they sungen were,The gast of Gy grieved her no more.

(Lines 1883–84)

The efficacy of the church’s practice is thus affirmed. Yet in three separate ac-counts of the ghost’s vanishing, The Gast of Gy is careful to mark a certain tensionor at least a measure of distance between the suffering soul and the institutionthat is essential to salvation. This distance seems to be a way of highlighting theemotional intimacy that lies at the heart of the experience of mourning, anintimacy that the doctrine wisely does not attempt to efface. In the first account,at the end of the long sequence of questions and answers, the prior is allowedone last expression of skepticism about the ghost’s nature. You seem to havebeen able to hear our speech, he remarks to the voice, and the voice replies,“Yea, for certain” (line 1897). Then you have ears, the prior quickly counters,and are therefore “a bodily thing / And not ghostly, as thou has told” (lines1900–1901). The voice once again cites Scripture against his interrogator: thespirit inspires where it will and you may hear its voice, but you do not knowwhere it comes from or where it is going. “And right as he these words gan say, /Suddenly he went away” (lines 1909–10).

The second account, on the Feast of the Epiphany, marks the tension betweenthe prior and the ghost still more sharply. When the prior asks how many popesthere shall be from this time until the Day of Judgment, the ghost rebuffs thequestion and dismisses the questioners:


And therefore may ye now each one,Whereso ye will, wend forth your way.

(Lines 2036–37)

He adds an appeal for prayers, both for himself and for all souls that suffer pain,but the appeal turns immediately into a reproach. “Holy Church prays not sofast / For Christian souls” (lines 2041–42) as it once did, and religious menshould mend their ways quickly, before evil befalls them. Having said thesewords, the voice again falls silent, this time forever. For the third account of theghost’s disappearance is only confirmation of its silence. At Easter the popesends his men “to seek the sooth of this” (line 2056), that is, to investigatefurther the truth of the haunting, but in “the house of Gy” they find no traceof the ghost. They conclude—as the ghost himself had predicted—that Gy’sspirit has ascended to heaven “where comfort is withouten care” (line 2061).The end is a happy one in which the church can claim to have played an im-portant role, but the ghost’s parting words remain a reproach and a warning.

47. Cf. William Henry Schofield, Mythical Bards and the Life of William Wallace, Har-vard Studies in Comparative Literature, 5 (Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress, 1920), pp. 26–54.

48. And sumetyme lyke ane feind, transfigurate,And sumetyme lyke the greislie gaist of Gye;In divers formis oft-tymes disfigurate,And sumtyme dissagysit full plesandlye.

(Ibid., pp. 42–43, citing Eyre-Todd, Scottish Poetry of the Sixteenth Century [Glas-gow: Hodge, 1892], p. 29.)

49. “What is all the legend of fictitious miracles in the lives of the saints; and allthe histories of apparitions and ghosts alleged by the doctors of the RomanChurch, to make good their doctrines of hell and purgatory, the power of exor-cism, and other doctrines which have no warrant, neither in reason nor Scrip-ture; as also all those traditions which they call the unwritten word of God; butold wives’ fables?” Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (London:Penguin, 1968), p. 702. Hobbes concedes that there are stories dispersed inthe writings of the church fathers that support a belief in apparitions from thedead, but their prevalence indicates only that the early fathers were too proneto believe false reports: “Gregory the Pope and St. Bernard have somewhat ofapparitions of ghosts that said they were in purgatory; and so has our Bede: butnowhere, I believe, but by report from others. But if they, or any other, relateany such stories of their own knowledge, they shall not thereby confirm themore such vain reports, but discover their own infirmity or fraud” (702–3).

50. John Foxe, “The Story of Simon Fish,” in The Complete Works of St. Thomas More,ed. Frank Manley, Germain Marc’hadour, Richard Marius, and Clarence Miller(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), Appendix D, 7:441. Elsewhere Foxeremarks simply that copies of the Beggar’s Supplication “were strewed abroadin the streets of London and also before the king” (Acts and Monuments, ed.George Townsend, 8 vols. [New York: AMS Press, 1965], 4:666).


51. In the event, the interrogation, according to Foxe, did not take place becauseFish’s young daughter was ill with plague. Fish himself died of the disease withinthe year. His wife survived and went on tomarry James Bainham, another Protes-tant who was arrested by More a few years later and burned at the stake.

52. Utopia, ed. Edward Surtz, S.J., and J. H. Hexter, in The Complete Works of St.Thomas More, vol. 4 (1965), p. 225. “How great and how lazy is the crowd ofpriests and so-called religious!” (131), More’s traveler had earlier exclaimed, inaccounting for the grinding poverty in Europe.

53. Ibid., p. 239.

54. The Supplication of Souls, in vol. 7 of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, p.120. All citations are to this edition.

55. More follows Jean Gerson’s Querela defunctorum in igne purgatorio detentorum adsuperstites in terra amicos (1427). See Germain Marc’hadour’s introduction toThe Supplication of Souls, pp. xcvi–ciii.

56. John More’s will, signed February 26, 1527, “bestows more money on massesto be said for his soul than on any other purpose: £5 (or more) per year for sevenyears for two priests studying divinity, one at Oxford the other at Cambridge; anannual obit at St. Lawrence Jewry for ten years; and a trental of masses (in addi-tion to a dirge and requiem) to be said by each of the four orders of friars”(Germain Marc’hadour, “Popular Devotions Concerning Purgatory,” in YaleSupplication of Souls, Appendix E, pp. 452–53).

57. Jean Molinet (d. 1507), Complainte des Tresspasses, has a passage very reminis-cent of More’s Supplication, written only a few years later:

You rest on silken sheets,While we in torment burn and roast;The soothing lute lulls you to sleep,Most sweetly, while we harshly and mostHideously from bed are pressedAll naked, while you are well dressed;We are tortured, and while you laugh, we weep.

(Quoted in Delumeau, Sin and Fear, p. 386.)

Cf., similarly, further verses from Molinet, p. 396.

58. Aside from slyly paying tribute to his own clandestine sources of information,More’s account carefully sidesteps any claim that the dead might have been ableto discover who wrote A Supplication for the Beggars by spying on the living. Inthis caution, More is following Augustine’s line of thought in “On Care to BeHad for the Dead” (De cura pro mortuis): “So then we must confess that the deadindeed do not know what is doing here . . . : afterwards, however, they hear itfrom those who from hence go to them at their death; not indeed every thing,but what things those are allowed to make known who are suffering also toremember these things; and which it is meet for those to hear, whom they in-form of the same. It may be also, that from the Angels, who are present in thethings which are doing here, the dead do hear somewhat, which for each one


of them to hear He judgeth right to Whom all things are subject” (New AdventCatholic Website: http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1316.html). More imag-ines, however, that the dead in Purgatory are temporarily in the hands ofdemons and the devil, not of angels.

59. For More’s use of Scripture, see Germain Marc’hadour’s introduction to theYale edition of The Supplication of Souls, pp. lxxiv–lxxxvii. An attempt to justifythe doctrine of Purgatory only “by natural reason & good phylosophye” (Aiiv)was made by More’s brother-in-law, John Rastell, in A new boke of Purgatory whichis a dyaloge & disputacyon betwene one Comyngo an Almayne a Christen man & oneGyngemyn a turke of Machometts law . . . (London, 1530). The Turk persuades theGerman, who is rehearsing Protestant objections to Purgatory, that Purgatorymust exist.

60. “Purgatory,” writes Le Goff, “did not exist before 1170 at the earliest” (TheBirth of Purgatory, p. 135).

61. Quoted in Yale Supplication, p. 368. For “Exorcism,” see The Colloquies of Eras-mus, trans. Craig R. Thompson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965),pp. 230–37. More himself is thought to be figured in one of the characters inthis colloquy.

62. See, similarly, Speculum Sacerdotale: a fifteenth-century English collection of“sermones de tempore et de sanctis,” of the same type as Mirk’s Festial. Theaccount of All Souls’ Day to help the dead in Purgatory rehearses some of theusual tales of the help that masses, alms, etc. can do for the dead. Such talesfunction to shore up the doctrine. Edward Weatherly, ed., Speculum Sacerdotale,Early English Text Society, o.s., 200 (London: Oxford University Press, 1936).

63. Gobi, Dialogue avec un Fantome, pp. 130–31.

64. Ross, Middle English Sermons, pp. 176–77.

65. Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, p. 219.

66. Quoted in Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, p. 275.

67. Quoted in ibid., p. 319.

68. Miles Coverdale, Remains, ed. George Pearson (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1846), p. 475.

69. Miscellaneous Writings and Letters of Thomas Cranmer, ed. John Edmund Cox(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1846), pp. 43–44.

70. The idea, which seems to anticipate Marlowe’s Mephostophilis, is quite old.Cf. Hugh Ripelin (thirteenth-century): “[W]e say that demons always carry Hellwith them” (quoted in Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, p. 264).

71. The passage concludes with another conventional misogynistic joke: “Yet hearwe sometimes our wives pray for us most warmly. For in chyding with her secondhusband to spight him withal, God have mercy says she on my first husband’ssoul, for he was y-wisse an honest man far unlike you. And then marvel wemuch when we hear they say so well by us. For they were wont to tell us farotherwise” (149).

295N OT ES T O C H A P T ER F O U R

72. On the close relation between Purgatory and charity, see, for example, CliveBurgess, “ ‘By Quick and by Dead’: Wills and Pious Provision in Late MedievalBristol,” English Historical Review 305 (1987): 837–58. Since the prayers of thevirtuous poor were thought to be particularly efficacious, the rich in effect pur-chased them through charitable donations. Doles of bread or money, Burgesspoints out, invariably accompanied funerals, and the wills of the wealthy oftenestablished long-term almsgiving, in the hope and expectation of the benefici-aries’s prayers.

73. The ratio deployed here—the worst fire on earth, compared to the fire ofotherworld, is as painted fire is to real fire—is traditional. See, for example,Richard Rolle, “To live well”:

For as fire is hatter euerywhoreÙen is a fire paynted on a wowe:right so ıo fire is hatter ıoreÙen is ıo fire here ıat we knowe.

(In Yorkshire Writers: Richard Rolle and His Followers [London: Swan Sonnenschein,1896], lines 97–100.) See, likewise, The Pricke of Conscience :

Wharfor ıe payn ıat ıe saul ıar hentesEr mare bitter ıan alle ıe tourmentesÙat alle ıe marters in erthe tholed,Sen God for us boght and sold.For ıe lest payn of ıe payns ıar sereEs mare ıan es ıe mast payn here.

Rolle, The Pricke of Conscience, lines 2722–27. (Rolle’s authorship of this work isnow considered doubtful.)

74. A Disputation of Purgatory, in The Works of the English Reformers: William Tyndaleand John Frith, ed. Thomas Russell, 3 vols. (London: Ebenezer Palmer, 1831),3:183.

75. On poor relief in Tudor England, see Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudorand Stuart England (London: Longman, 1988).

CHAPTER FOUR: STAGING GHOSTS

1. A. L. Rowse, Tudor Cornwall: Portrait of a Society (London: Jonathan Cape, 1943),p. 335. Henry Caesar was the brother of Dr. Julius Caesar, an important judgeand member of Parliament. At dinner, Rowse writes, Henry Caesar had “main-tained the apparition of souls after their departure out of this life, and for proofaffirmed that Sir Walter Mildmay was desirous to see Cardinal Pole after hisdeath, and one by conjuration caused the said Cardinal to appear unto Sir Wal-ter. Then the conjurer asked of Sir Walter Mildmay what he did see, and SirWalter answered him ‘a man much like the cardinal’ ” (335).

2. “Sweet William’s Ghost” (appended by Scott to “Clerk Sanders”) in The Englishand Scottish Popular Ballads, ed. Francis James Child, pt. 3 (Boston: HoughtonMifflin, 1885), p. 230. In version D of this ballad, the ghost describes variousaspects of the afterlife to Margaret.

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3. Caesar was suspected of popish leanings when he was still quite young, and hehad fled briefly to the Continent. He returned and recanted his errors, but thesuspicions persisted for years.

4. Paul Gottschalk, TheMeanings of Hamlet: Modes of Literary Interpretation since Brad-ley (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1972).

5. Another significant exception, perhaps, is history, not only because they havea place in chronicles influenced by classical precedents but also because inmorefanciful narratives, such as The Mirror for Magistrates, the ghosts of historical fig-ures relate their own tragic downfalls.

6. The Tenne Tragedies of Seneca, pt. 1 (Manchester: The Spenser Society, 1887), p.212. The appearance of a ghost in this translation may not be an innocent pieceof classicizing. Jasper Heywood was a Catholic who lost his fellowship in AllSouls’ College, Oxford, in the wake of Queen Elizabeth’s accession, on thegrounds that he refused to conform to the religious changes. Having alreadybeen ordained as a priest, he went to Rome and in 1562 became a Jesuit. It isquite possible that he had a charged interest in the existence of ghosts.

7. The Misfortunes of Arthur, ed. Brian Joy Corrigan (New York: Garland, 1992),Appendix A, p. 194. The spectators included Queen Elizabeth, before whomthe play was performed at Greenwich on February 8, 1587/88. Francis Baconhelped to arrange the dumb shows. Hughes’s fellow student, William Fulbecke,tried his hand at alternative speeches by the ghost of Gorlois—evidently, it wasa particularly amusing exercise—which Hughes appended to his text.

8. The Lamentable Tragedy of Locrine, ed. Jane Lytton Gooch, Garland English Texts7 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1981), 3.3.34–35.

9. Antonio’s Revenge (3.1.35–37), in Selected Plays of John Marston, ed. Macdonald P.Jackson and Michael Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

10. More precisely, the issue is not specifically confessional. See the very full discus-sion in Eleanor Prosser,Hamlet and Revenge (Stanford: Stanford University Press,1967).

11. Quoted in F. W. Moorman, “The Pre-Shakespearean Ghost,” Modern LiteraryReview 1 (1906): 94. A “pilch” is an outer garment. Moorman cites the plays Ihave discussed in the last paragraph and others, to which may be added manyreferences now easily culled from the Chadwyck-Healey database.

12. The ghost of Sylla, who speaks the prologue of Catiline, is directly descendedfrom the Senecan “spright” of Achilles whom Jasper Heywood added to theTroas. Heywood’s Achilles seems to forget the insubstantiality of ghosts; heclaims that “[t]he soil doth shake to bear my heavy foot.” Jonson, aware of theabsurdity, has Sylla wonder why the soil is not shaking: “Do’st thou not feel me,Rome? not yet? Is night / So heavy on thee, and my weight so light?” There is afaint suggestion, too, that he is a demon come to possess the soul of the alreadywicked Catiline: “[I]nto / Thy darker bosom,” he declares, “enter Sylla’s spirit: /All, that was mine, and bad, thy breast inherit.” But Jonson does not succeed inmaking Sylla’s ghost much more than a flat, formal device, a piece of classicalmachinery: he signals Catiline’s passage from merely personal crimes to a more


ambitious project—“The ruin of thy country” (1.1.1 ff.)—and then disappearsfrom the scene, never to return.

In Poetaster 3.4 Jonson mocks the whole business of revenge ghosts:

TVCCA. Nay, thou shalt see that, shall ravish thee anon: prick up thine /ears, stinkard: the Ghost, boys. /

1. BOY Vindicta. /2. BOY Timoria. /1. BOY Vindicta. /2. BOY Timoria. /1. BOY Veni. /2. BOY Veni. /TVCCA. Now, thunder, sirrah, you, the rumbling player.

(In Ben Jonson, Works, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson [1932; Oxford:Clarendon, 1986], 4:252–53.)

13. The Jew of Malta, in Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus and Other Plays, ed.David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 2.1.24–30. The haunting of buried treasure is one of the theories that Horatio invokes,when he tries to get the ghost to speak:

[I]f thou hast uphoarded in thy lifeExtorted treasure in the womb of earth—For which, they say, you spirits oft walk in death—Speak of it, stay and speak.

(1.1.117–20)

14. Doctor Faustus (B-text), in Bevington and Rasmussen, Doctor Faustus and OtherPlays, 4.1.74–78.

15. The Historie of the Damnable life and deserved death of John Faustus, ed. WilliamRose (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1963), p. 150.

16. Among the very many studies of theatrical ghost lore, two early-twentieth-cen-tury essays by F. W. Moorman provide a helpful starting place: “The Pre-Shake-spearean Ghost,” Modern Language Review 1 (1906): 86–95, and “Shakespeare’sGhosts,” Modern Language Review 1 (1906): 192–201. Marjorie Garber’s Shake-speare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality (New York: Methuen, 1987)is particularly rich in insights.

17. UsingHamlet as his principal example, Jacques Derrida proposes what he callsa “hauntology,” a queasy awareness of a suppressed politics. Derrida’s overridingconcern is the ghostly presence in contemporary culture of Karl Marx, but hisbook, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the NewInternational, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), has many acuteobservations about the functioning of the ghost in Shakespeare’s play.

18. The Puritan: or, the Widow of Watling Street (2.1) in Disputed Plays of William Shake-speare, ed. William Kozlenko (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1974), pp. 239–40.

19. See, for examples, the Catholic LeLoyer’s extensive rehearsal of all of the waysin which people may be deceived into mistaking the products of their own fearor imagination for ghostly apparitions.


20. See Lodovico Ariosto, Supposes, trans. George Gascoigne, ed. Donald Beecherand John Butler, Carleton Renaissance Plays in Translation 33 (Ottawa: Dove-house Editions, 1999). Cf. Joel Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind (Berkeley andLos Angeles: University of California Press, 1978).

21. Shakespeare’s interest in this genius or daemon is manifested again in theSoothsayer’s advice to Antony that he keep at a distance from Caesar:

Therefore, O Antony, stay not by his side.Thy daemon, that thy spirit which keeps thee, isNoble, courageous, high, unmatchable,Where Caesar’s is not. But, near him, thy angelBecomes afeard, as being o’erpowered. ThereforeMake space enough between you.

(Antony and Cleopatra, 2.3.16–21)

22. “Suit” may also have the latent sense of “attendance at court and personalservice”: Sebastian appears to Viola as someone in the court of Olivia.

23. Charlotte Beradt, The Third Reich of Dreams, trans. Adriane Gottwald (Welling-borough, Northamptonshire: Aquarian Press, 1985), pp. 21, 135.

24. A historical account of the Third Reich that strips away the nightmare in orderto concentrate on the events themselves risks missing a crucial dimension ofthe Nazis’ peculiar exercise of Gewaltherrschaft. The victims’ dreams, ReinhartKoselleck argues, “are more than fictional testimony of terror and about ter-ror. . . . They are physical manifestations of terror but without the witnesseshaving fallen victim to physical violence. In other words, it is precisely as fic-tion that they are elements of historical reality. . . . Even as apparitions, thedreams are instrumentalizations of terror itself.” Reinhart Koselleck, FuturesPast: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge:MIT Press,1985), p. 220.

25. There were many means besides terror for obtaining compliant behavior,means that have been amply documented in recent years: cunning lies, cleverdangling of false hopes, the exploitation of petty greed, the arousal of a fantasyof special treatment or unusual exemption, the lure of normal assumptions bywhich certain things could not possibly be envisaged because they made norational sense. In the company of such strategies, terror had its risks, from thepoint of view of the perpetrators, since it could trigger desperate acts of resis-tance. Nonetheless, it came to play an essential role in the organization andexecution of the complex scheme of genocide.

26. Terror had the further advantage of inhibiting outright opposition or evensimple, modest acts of humanity on the part of those non-Jews—among themcongenial colleagues, neighbors, friends of the victims—who were not slatedfor destruction, and it could attract and excite that part of the population thatenjoys the spectacle of terror.

On terror’s producing the immobilizing effect of dreams, see the end of TheAeneid:


Just as in dreams when the night-swoon of sleepWeighs on our eyes, it seems we try in vainTo keep on running, try with all our might,But in the midst of effort faint and fail;Our tongue is powerless, familiar strengthWill not hold up our body, not a soundOr word will come: just so with Turnus now. . . .He trembled now before the poised spear-shaftAnd saw no way to escape.

(bk. 12, lines 1232–45; trans. Robert Fitzgerald [New York: Random House,1983].)

27. Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 218. Throughout the 1930s the Nazi regime movedto transform phantasmatic representations—wildly malevolent imaginings recy-cled in the pages of Die Sturmer and the ranting of Hitler and Goebbels—intolived reality. The dreams of the victims work as dreams by reversing this process,transforming lived reality into phantasmatic representation by means of thesmallest effects of exaggeration. But this desperate, terrified attempt at reversalwas continually outstripped by reality itself. By the time of the exterminationcamps, exaggeration itself had virtually become impossible, but even in the1930s reality had taken on a dreamlike horror that frequently edges towardinsane comedy, particularly where the dreamers we have quoted find it, in thelanguage of decrees. January 29, 1936: “To avoid giving foreign visitors a nega-tive impression, signs with strong language will be removed. Signs, such as ‘Jewsare unwanted here,’ will suffice.” August 17, 1938: “All Jews must adopt thenames of ‘Israel’ for men and ‘Sara’ for women as additional first names.” Irecognize that it takes a strong stomach to find the comedy here, but it exists,in the abyss between the formal, normative, and communitarian implicationsof bureaucratic rationality and a twisted authoritarianism that scarcely bothersto masquerade or justify itself.

28. Shakespeare uses the imagery of vomiting surprisingly often in his work. Still,it is perhaps noteworthy that Clarence’s dream of his death agonies is strikinglyreminiscent of More’s vision of damnation as perpetual seasickness: “But thenshall ye sometimes see there some other whose body is so incurably corruptedthat they shall walter and totter and wring their hands and gnash the teeth, andtheir eyes water, their head ache, their body fret, their stomach wamble, and alltheir body shiver for pain, and yet shall never vomit at all: or if they vomit, yetshall they vomit still and never find ease thereof” (The Supplication of Souls, inThe Complete Works of St. Thomas More, 7:189).

29. It is not my purpose to insist on a close connection between every aspect ofShakespeare’s plays, which are not, after all, theological allegories, and the dis-course of Purgatory. But there is an obvious parallel here not only to the cen-trality of fear and guilt but also to the way in which dreams in the religious textswe have examined are said to materialize in bodily suffering.

30. Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 219.


31. Edward Hall, The Union of the Two Noble Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke (1548),in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, 8 vols.(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), 3:291. Hall makes a fine distinc-tion here between fear and the imagination, the heart and the head: Richard’sterrible dream almost “damped” his heart, but its principal effect was to stuff hishead and trouble his mind, that is, to poison his imagination. The consequencein the morning was an evident lack of alacrity (a feature that Shakespeare, aswe have seen, noticed and borrowed). Richard was sufficiently concerned, inHall’s account, that his appearance might be interpreted as a sign that he wasafraid of his enemies that he related to his followers the content of his dream.It was better that the king be thought to be mentally unsettled by shadows thanfrightened by real soldiers.

32. The True Tragedy of Richard III, in Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources ofShakespeare, 3:338.

33. Hall, in Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 3:291.

34. All citations of King Lear are to the Folio text (The Tragedy of King Lear) inThe Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: W. W. Norton,1997).

35. A few of the effigies may still be seen in Westminster Abbey. See the importantdiscussion in Horst Bredekamp, Thomas Hobbes, visuelle Strategien der Leviathan:Urbild des modernen Staates (Berlin: Akademie, 1999).

36. It is perhaps worth noting that Lady Macbeth’s term for her husband’s ter-ror—the “fit”—is the same term he himself had used when the murderer re-vealed that Fleance had escaped: “Then comes my fit again.” Lady Macbeth hadnot, of course, overheard Macbeth’s soliloquy (we are explicitly told that she iskeeping her “state,” that is, sitting in her formal place as hostess). The use ofthe same term could simply be an accident—after all, it is a reasonable word touse for what is going on—but it also serves as a tiny instance of the strangeoverlapping of consciousness, the presence of one mind within another, thateerily characterizes the relationship between this particular husband and wife.

37. The term “Ghost” is used in the stage directions, which are not, however, reli-ably attributed to Shakespeare and are not, in any case, part of the audience’sinformation.

38. The following six paragraphs on Macbeth are adapted from my essay “Shake-speare Bewitched,” in New Historical Literary Study, ed. Jeffrey Cox and LarryReynolds (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 108–35.

39. The significance of this encounter, principally in A Midsummer Night’s Dreamand Macbeth, is discussed in ibid.

40. The Discoverie of Witchcraft (London, 1584), p. 258.

41. Ibid., p. 74.

42. To these we can add, by way of Antony and Cleopatra, erotic fantasies. In thewake of the report that Cleopatra has killed herself, Antony makes his botched


suicide attempt. As he calls for his aptly named assistant, Eros, to run himthrough with a sword, Antony imagines his soul rushing to catch up with Cleopa-tra’s in the afterworld.

Eros!—I come, my queen:—Eros!—Stay for me.Where souls do couch on flowers we’ll hand in hand,And with our sprightly port make the ghosts gaze.Dido and her Aeneas shall want troops,And all the haunt be ours. Come, Eros, Eros!

(4.15.50–54)

“Dido and her Aeneas”: in Antony’s erotic imagination, Dido’s bitter anger atAeneas, which continues in Virgil’s account into the underworld, has vanished.Instead, there is an ecstatic vision of souls, couched on flowers in an amorous“haunt,” bearing witness to a kind of competitive celebrity in love. Characteristi-cally, Shakespeare’s play shatters this vision—Cleopatra, who has not in factkilled herself, a few minutes later cravenly refuses to risk her safety in order togive the dying Antony the farewell kiss he craves—and immediately reconstitutesit: “I am again for Cydnus / To meet Mark Antony” (5.2.224–25). At the endof the play, the dead lovers—Cleopatra and “her Antony”—are united by Caesar,in lines that strangely echo the imagery of postmortem celebrity in love, thoughit is not quite an Elysian couch that Caesar’s words invite us to imagine whenhe tells his followers to “take up” the queen’s bed:

She shall be buried by her Antony.No grave upon the earth shall clip in itA pair so famous.

(5.2.348–51)

Now that they are safely dead, it suits the coldly calculating Caesar to foster themythmaking: it confers a certain glamour upon his triumph. But, even as itbrilliantly exploits this glamour for its own triumph, Shakespeare’s play keepsenough ironic distance to call into question whether such ghosts could existanywhere but on the stage.

43. “You speak a language that I understand not,” Hermione responds to Leontes’accusation; “My life stands in the level of your dreams.” “Your actions are mydreams,” Leontes replies (3.2.78–80). (The Norton Shakespeare adds scarequotes to Leontes’ “dreams,” thereby clarifying the dominant sense at the ex-pense of the rich ambiguity of the line.)

44. Paulina continues with a variant of the fantasy:

Yet if my lord will marry—if you will, sir;No remedy but you will—give me the officeTo choose you a queen. She shall not be so youngAs was your former, but she shall be suchAs, walked your first queen’s ghost, it should take joyTo see her in your arms.

(5.1.76–81)

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CHAPTER FIVE: REMEMBER ME

1. Thomas Lodge, quoted in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geof-frey Bullough, 8 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), 7:24.

2. The passage, from an epistle “To the Gentlemen Students of both Universities”written by Nashe and prefixed to Greene’s Menaphon, printed in 1589, is worthquoting at length:

Ile turne backe to my first text, of studies of delight, and talke a little infriendship with a few of our triviall translators. It is a common practice nowa daies amongst a sort of shifting companions, that runne through everyarte and thrive by none to leave the trade of Noverint whereto they wereborne, and busie themselves with the indevours of art, that could scarcelielatinize their necke-verse if they should have neede; yet English Senecaread by candle-light yeeldes manie good sentences, as Blould is a begger, andso foorth: and if you intreate him faire in a frostie morning, he will affoordyou wholeHamlets, I should say Handfulls of tragical speaches. But O grief!Tempus edax rerum;—what is it that will last always? The sea exhaled by dropswill in continuance be drie; and Seneca, let bloud line by line, and pageby page, at length must needs die to our stage.

(In Hamlet: A New Variorum Edition, ed. Horace Howard Furness, 2 vols. [1877;New York: Dover, 1963], 2:5).

This passage has occasioned mountains of speculation that it refers to Shake-speare, who must have begun, on this evidence alone, as an attorney (Noverint)and then turned to the stage, writing an early version of Hamlet when he wouldhave been twenty-five years old. In the absence of any corroborating evidence,it seems wiser to conclude only that there was an earlier version of the Hamletstory onstage, that it was a bloody revenge play, and that it clearly struck at leastone canny observer, Nashe, as a popular English adaptation of Seneca.

The “neck-verse” to which Nashe alludes is the psalm (in Latin) that prisonersaccused of capital crimes would read in an effort to be tried in an ecclesiasticalcourt, where there was no death penalty, rather than in a civil court. See myessay “What Is the History of Literature?” Critical Inquiry 23 (1997): 460–81.

3. Saxo Grammaticus,Historiae Danicae, trans. Oliver Elton, in Bullough, Narrativeand Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 7:62.

4. Ibid., p. 70.

5. Fratricide Punished, translation adapted from H. H. Furness, in Bullough, Narra-tive and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 7:133.

6. Quoted in Furness, Variorum, Hamlet, 1:109.

7. Nikolaus Delius makes the interesting observation that Hamlet uses the word“bound” in the sense of ready addressed, while the Ghost uses it as the past partici-ple of the verb to bind (cited in Furness, Variorum, Hamlet, 1:96). The shift, then,is from preparation or expectation to obligation.

8. The Folio text of Hamlet, which is the basis for the Oxford edition on whichthe Norton Shakespeare is based, assigns this line to Marcellus, but the hint ofskepticism seems to support Q2’s assigning it to Horatio.

303N OT ES T O C H A P T ER F I V E

9. The Homilies of S. John Chrysostom on the Gospel of St. Matthew (Oxford: Parker,1844), pp. 418–19. The image of demonic stage playing is recurrent in earlierchurch writings. See, for example, Eusebius, Evangelicae praeparationis (The Prepa-ration for the Gospel), ed. and trans. E. H. Gifford (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1903), bk. 3, chap. 17: “The ministrants of the oracles we must in plaintruth declare to be evil daemons, playing both parts to deceive mankind, andat once time agreeing with the more fabulous suppositions concerning them-selves, to deceive the common people, and at another time confirming the state-ments of the philosophers’ jugglery in order to instigate them also and puffthem up: so that in every way it is proved that they speak no truth at all” (139).

10. The pattern of dual hauntings is described in Jacques Le Goff, The Birth ofPurgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1981), p. 294, and in Jean-Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Livingand the Dead in Medieval Society, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: Univer-sity of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 201–5.

11. Occasionally, the ghost’s “body” or “clothing” upon its return would be onlypartially white, to indicate how much of the purgatorial sentence had passedand how much still remained to be endured. And there could then be a thirdapparition—and in theory, at least, others as well—in which more of the cloth-ing would be white, in keeping with the gradual progress of purification.

12. The ghost does not answer; it stalks away, “offended” as Marcellus puts it, bythe way Horatio has addressed it. There is scholarly debate about what it is thathas offended the ghost. Eleanor Prosser (Hamlet and Revenge [Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press, 1967]), who believes that the apparition is demonic, thinks itis offended becauseHoratio has gone on to invokeHeaven: “By heaven, I chargethee speak.” Harold Jenkins thinks that it is because “this interlocutor is not theone it seeks” (Hamlet, Arden Shakespeare [London and New York: Metheun,1982], pp. 168–69), though it is difficult to see why this fact would cause it tofeel offended. G. R. Hibbard, glossing the word “usurp’st,” writes that “Horatiomeans that the Ghost has no right to be out at this time of night, and no rightto the form it has assumed. It is not, therefore, surprising that this unfortunatevictim of usurpation should be offended” (Hamlet, Oxford Shakespeare, ed. G. R.Hibbard [New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 146). Hibbard’s seemsto me easily the most plausible explanation, though we have no way of knowingwhether Marcellus’s assessment is correct.

13. The point is reinforced when we subsequently learn that the king has beendead for more than two months, and still more when we learn that somethinghorrible had happened to the king’s skin at the point of his death. The playgoes on, of course, to stage a scene of exhumation that vividly depicts variousdegrees of decay and putrefaction: “My gorge rises at it,” Hamlet remarks.

14. IIII Livres des Spectres ou Apparitions et visions d’Esprits, Anges et Demons se mon-strans sensiblement aux hommes, quoted in John Dover Wilson, What Happens in“Hamlet” (1935; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), p. 67.

15. In On Memory, Aristotle argues that memory, and indeed that all intellectualactivity, is impossible without images or phantasms. Aristotle, On Memory, in The


Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols. (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1984), 1:714.

16. Furness, Variorum, Hamlet, 2:146.

17. Claudius’s opening speech, in act 1, scene 2, depicts this preoccupation indirect relation to the accelerated and deliberate dulling of remembrance en-tailed by his marriage to Gertrude:

Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother’s deathThe memory be green, and that it us befittedTo bear our hearts in grief and our whole kingdomTo be contracted in one brow of woe,Yet so far hath discretion fought with natureThat we with wisest sorrow think on himTogether with remembrance of ourselves.

(1.2.1–7)

BothHoratio andGertrude confirm PrinceHamlet’s own anguished perceptionthat the remarriage was, as Gertrude puts it, “o’er-hasty” (2.2.57).

18. Polonius is willing to stake his head that Hamlet is mad for love, and describes,with the precision of a physician, the progress of the disease:

And he, repulsed—a short tale to make—Fell into a sadness, then into a fast,Thence to a watch, thence into a weakness,Thence to a lightness, and, by this declension,Into the madness wherein now he raves.

(2.2.146–50)

Ophelia, though with less certainty, concurs:

POLONIUS. Mad for thy love?OPHELIA. My lord, I do not know,

But truly I do fear it.(2.1.86–87)

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern speculate that Hamlet may be suffering from akind of political claustrophobia. “To me,” Hamlet tells them, Denmark “is aprison.” “Why, then your ambition makes it one,” Rosencrantz replies; “ ’tis toonarrow for yourmind” (2.2.245–47). Gertrude has a clearer grasp of the sourcesof her son’s distemper:

I doubt it is no other but the main—His father’s death and our o’er-hasty marriage.

(2.2.56–57)

19. For brilliant reflections on the path that leads from mourning to anger, seePhilip Fisher, “Thinking about Killing: Hamlet and the Path among the Pas-sions,” Raritan 11 (1991): 43–77.

20. Later in the play Laertes similarly embodies the spirit of rash, reckless revenge.In both cases the play suggests the limits of this heroic rashness: Fortinbras’sincursion is easily outmaneuvered by Claudius’s diplomacy, and Laertes is deftly


turned into Claudius’s secret agent. At the same time Hamlet does not endorseas an alternative a more sober deliberation: Hamlet praises rashness for savinghis life at sea, and his revenge, when it finally does come about, happens as aconsequence of unpremeditated actions.

21. Contrast his response to the first haunting: “Angels and ministers of gracedefend us!” (1.4.20). It is notable that though the Ghost of old Hamlet, like theghost of Gy, appears in his widow’s closet, he does not appear to his widow orwish to communicate with her. Contrast The Revelation to the Monk of EveshamAbbey, ed. Valerian Paget (New York: McBride, 1909): “The same young manwitnessed on oath that the third night of his father’s appearing, he heard hismother enquiring, and sometimes answering him; and then afterwards she toldme the words that he had said to her. The son said he heard no words when hisfather was speaking to her, but he waited patiently till they had done talking.His mother told him that she had heard from her husband twice before. Sheacknowledged that her husband was full of wrath, and blamed her because hewas forgotten and put out of mind, for, though she was warned by him after hisdeath to do but a little thing for him, yet she had neglected to do even that”(145–46).

22. Furness, Variorum, cites Miscellaneous Observations on “Hamlet” (1:299).

23. In an eloquent essay that pursues several of the key questions that concernme in this chapter, Anthony Low argues that Hamlet’s whole problem is a failureor inability to remember what the Ghost’s visit should have prompted him toremember: the obligation to pray for his father’s soul in Purgatory. “Hamlettakes his oath to ‘remember,’ ” Low writes, “with reference only to vengeance.He never remarks that to remember the dead in Purgatory means chiefly topray for them, especially by offering masses for their souls” (“Hamlet and theGhost of Purgatory: Intimations of Killing the Father,” English Literary Renais-sance 29 [1999]: 456). For Low, who unequivocally laments the loss of the Cath-olic Purgatory, the tragedy is the tragedy of a whole generation’s systematic for-getting and hence killing the father. That is, in Low’s account, by ceasing to bea Catholic, by forgetting or no longer knowing how to pray for his father’s soul,“Hamlet implicates himself, as all the younger generation are unwittingly impli-cated, in the hidden crime” (465).

24. Francis Bacon, “Of Revenge,” in A Selection of His Works, ed. Sidney Warhaft(New York: Odyssey, 1965), p. 55.

25. Later in the play Hamlet saves his life by using his father’s signet, which hehas been carrying in his purse, so that the altered commission, now calling forthe deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, appears to come from the Danishking. Of course, the king in question is now Claudius—and Hamlet explainsthat the signet was “the model of that Danish seal” (5.2.51) that Claudius hadused—but perhaps the fact that Hamlet was carrying the seal is an extension ofthis will to ventriloquize his father’s voice.

26. JohannWolfgang von Goethe,WilhelmMeister’s Apprenticeship, trans. Eric Black-all (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 146.


27. ThomasWhite, TheMiddle State of Souls from the hour of death to the day of judgment(London, 1659).

28. “Claim” rather than “meaning” because the Ghost may only be lying, luringHamlet into a belief that Purgatory actually exists and then luring him furthertoward damnation by inducing him to commit an act of vengeance.

29. See Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, p. 227.

30. The Last Judgement in The Chester Mystery Cycle (1475), ed. R. M. Lumiansky andDavid Mills, Early English Text Society, s.s., 3 (London: Oxford University Press,1974), p. 441. See, similarly, A lyttel boke . . . of Purgatorye (London, [1534?]):

Betwene the payne of hell / certaynlyAnd betwene the payne / of PurgatoryeIs no dyfference / but certes that oneShall haue an ende / and that other none.

(Quoted in Germain Marc’hadour, “Popular Devotions Concerning Purgatory,”in the Yale Edition of The Supplication of Souls, in The Complete Works of St. ThomasMore, ed. Frank Manley, Germain Marc’hadour, Richard Marius, and ClarenceMiller [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990], Appendix E, 7: 447.)

31. Everyman, in Medieval Drama, ed. David Bevington (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,1975), lines 70–71.

32. Cf. Paget, The Revelation to the Monk of Evesham Abbey, p. 141: “I saw numberlesspeople there, who had died suddenly, and who were being punished almostbeyond measure.” William of Auvergne (regent and master of theology at Parisfrom 1222 to 1228 and bishop of Paris from 1228 until his death in 1249)argued that Purgatory is a continuation of earthly penance. It is necessary be-cause “those who die suddenly or without warning, for example, ‘by the sword,suffocation, or excess of suffering,’ those whom death takes unawares beforethey have had time to complete their penance, must have a place where theymay do so” (Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, p. 242).

33. On the importance of deathbed houseling, for example, see a sermon by JohnMirk. A Christian man, dying, sends for the priest to “come to hym wyth Godysbody.” He receives the sacrament steadfastly believing that it is the real body ofChrist, “And so wyth his perfite beleue he armeth hym, and maketh hym strongand my8ty forto a8enstond ıe fendes ıat wol assayle hym, when he passeth outefrom ıe body, in al wyse ıat ıai con, forto assay, 8ef ıei mow bryng hym outeof ıe beleue. Then schal ıe sacrament ıat he receyvet make hym so myghty,ıat he schal overcome hem and sett no8t by hem” (quoted in C. W. Dugmore,The Mass and the English Reformers [London: Macmillan, 1958], p. 68). The speci-ficity of the Catholic nature of these last rites is open to debate, since someversion of each of them was compatible with Protestantism.

34. Hamlet’s “Rest, rest, perturbed spirit” may be compared to the mad Ophelia’sprayer for her murdered father: “God ’a’ mercy on his soul. / And of all Chris-tian souls, I pray God” (4.5.194–95). What would these prayers have soundedlike to Elizabethan ears? “Prayer for the dead was such a deeply engrained prac-tice in mid-Tudor England that it took several decades of preaching and disci-


pline to draw it to a close. Some people believed that the soul still lingered inthe vicinity of the body during the first thirty days after burial, a liminal situationrequiring great ritual caution. During the Elizabethan period, especially in theearly part of the reign, some testators continued to provide for this ‘trigintal’period by ordering a black cover for their coffin or grave during this month’smind, or arranging for another service, dole, and funeral feast when it came toan end. Though repudiated by the Reformation, the traditional month-mindand year-mind had a customary half-life in many parts of England as far apartas Lancashire and Essex. Provisions for obits and month-minds and prayers forall Christian souls were not uncommon in wills of the 1550s, 1560s, and 1570s,though heirs and executors were increasingly hard-pressed to carry them out.”David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion and the Life-Cycle in Tudorand Stuart England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 398. Cressywrites, however, that the disciplinary process, though prolonged, was basicallycompleted by the second half of Elizabeth’s reign, so Hamlet in 1601 wouldseem to hark back to a world lost.

35. Quoted in Furness, Variorum, Hamlet, 1:111.

36. John Grange, The Golden Aphroditis (London, 1577; reprint, New York: Schol-ars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1939), fol. Cv.

37. See, however, the speculation in Fr. Christopher Devlin,Hamlet’s Divinity (Lon-don: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963), pp. 31–32: “One may find another [referenceto the Roman Breviary] in Hamlet’s first reaction to the Ghost, ‘Angels andministers of grace defend us’ (I.iv.39). For the prayer in the Office of St. Mi-chael, ‘May we be defended on earth by thy ministers in heaven’ is accompaniedby an antiphon which invokes the Angelic protection HIC ET UBIQUE (i.V.136).An ironic echoing of the Liturgy may be sufficient explanation of Hamlet’s oddirruption in Latinity, ‘Hic et ubique!’, when the Ghost moans beneath him.”

38. “Pro quiescentibus in cimiterio.OratioDeus, in cujus miseratione animae fidelium requiescunt; animabus famulorumfamularumque tuarum omnium, hic et ubique in Christo quiescentium, dapropitius veniam peccatorum, ut a cunctis reatibus absoluti, tecum sine finelaetentur. Per Dominum,” inMissale Ad Usum Insignis et Praeclarae Ecclesiae Sarum[Missale Sarum], ed. Francis Dickinson (Oxford: J. Parker, 1861–1883), p. 878.The phrase hic et ubique is repeated in the Secreta and Postcommunio as well.

39. Thomas Rogers, The Catholic Doctrine of the Church of England (Cambridge: Uni-versity Press for the Parker Society, 1882), p. 221.

40. Edgar C. S. Gibson, The Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, 2 vols. (Lon-don: Methuen & Co., 1897), 2:537.

41. In The Fate of the Dead: A Study in Folk Eschatology in the West Country after theReformation (Ipswich: Rowan and Littlefield, 1979), Theo Brown argues that inrepudiating the “Romish doctrine” of Purgatory, the English church had notmeant to abolish Purgatory altogether but only the abuses of the doctrine,abuses associated with Rome. The wholesale assault on suffrages for the dead


makes this argument implausible, but, as we have seen, early reformers likeTyndale kept open the imaginative possibility that there might be an unspecifi-able process of purgation. It is this imaginative possibility, rather than any prac-tice, that the careful Anglican language seems to preserve—and that Shake-speare, as I have been arguing, realized he could exploit.

42. Doctor Faustus (B-text), 3.2.79–81, in Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus andOther Plays, ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1995).

43. Quoted in Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, 7:170-71.

44. The issue has been the subject of extensive scholarly discussion. Arguing forthe Catholic position, I. J. Semper has suggested that, under certain circum-stances, vengeance could be called for, but there is no evidence that Hamlet’scircumstances in any way match those that might possibly justify the assassina-tion of Claudius. See I. J. Semper, Hamlet without Tears (Dubuque, Iowa: LorasCollege Press, 1946). For the dominant counterview, see Prosser, Hamlet andRevenge.

45. In the Second Quarto, the spirit that Hamlet has seen may be “a deale [devil].”The singular has the effect of individualizing this particular apparition—that is,individual devils, in the service of Satan, could impersonate individuals or in-habit pagan statues.

46. For a sampling, see Dover Wilson,What Happens in “Hamlet”; Roy Battenhouse,“The Ghost in Hamlet: A Catholic ‘Linchpin’?”Studies in Philology 68 (1951):161–92; John Vyvyan, The Shakespearean Ethic (London: Chatto and Windus,1959); Miriam Joseph, “Discerning the Ghost inHamlet,” PMLA 76 (1961): 302;Christopher Devlin, Hamlet’s Divinity (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UniversityPress, 1963); Miriam Joseph, “Hamlet, a Christian Tragedy,” Studies in Philology59 (1962): 119–40; Prosser,Hamlet and Revenge; Robert F. Fleissner, “Subjectivityas an Occupational Hazard of ‘Hamlet Ghost’ Critics,” Hamlet Studies (NewDelhi) 1 (1979): 23–33; Walter N. King, Hamlet’s Search for Meaning (Athens:University of Georgia Press, 1982), pp. 22–40; Roland Mushat Frye, The Renais-sance “Hamlet”: Issues and Responses in 1600 (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1984), pp. 11–24.

47. Robert West, among others, has trenchantly argued that “Shakespeare know-ingly mixed the evidence and did it for the sake of dramatic impact” (RobertH. West, Shakespeare and the Outer Mystery [Lexington: University of KentuckyPress, 1968], p. 63). West notes that quite a few critics have preceded him inthis perception.

48. These pages on the Eucharist inHamlet are adapted from the longer andmoredetailed discussion in my essay “The Mousetrap” in Catherine Gallagher andStephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 2000).

49. Hamlet, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987),p. 165.


50. See Alan Kreider, English Chantries: The Road to Dissolution (Cambridge: Har-vard University Press, 1979).

51. See Robert Whiting, The Blind Devotion of the People: Popular Religion and theEnglish Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Christo-pher Haigh, Reformation and Resistance in Tudor Lancashire (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1975; J.J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the EnglishPeople (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984). Many historians agree with ChristopherHaigh’s summary view that “[f]or much of the reign of Elizabeth, the Churchof England was a prescribed, national Church with more-or-less Protestant lit-urgy and theology but an essentially non-Protestant (and in some respects anti-Protestant) laity” (“The Church of England, the Catholics and the People,” inThe Reign of Elizabeth I, ed. Christopher Haigh [Houndsmill: Macmillan, 1984],p. 196). In the latter part of Elizabeth’s reign, however, evangelical campaignsof reform seem to have made considerable headway.

52. The English Rite, ed. F. E. Brightman, 2d ed. rev., 2 vols. (London: Rivingtons,1921), 2:858. See the remarks in Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Tradi-tional Religion in England, c.1400–c.1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press,1992):

The funeral service of 1549 did contain prayers for the dead, and empha-sized their community with the living, “they with us and we with them.”That sense of the continuing presence of the dead among the living wasvividly expressed in the Sarum funeral rite and in the 1549 prayer-book bythe fact that at the moment of the committal of the body to the earththe priest turned to the corpse, scattered earth on it and, in Cranmer’stranslation, said “I commend thy soule to God the father almighty, and thybody to the grounde, earth to earth, asshes to asshes, dust to dust.” Thedead could still be spoken to directly, even in 1549, because in some sensethey still belonged within the human community. But in the world of the1552 book the dead were no longer with us. They could neither be spokento nor even about, in any way that affected their well-being. The dead hadgone beyond the reach of human contact, even of human prayer. Therewas nothing which could even be mistaken for a prayer for the dead in the1552 funeral rite. The service was no longer a rite of intercession on behalfof the dead, but an exhortation to faith on the part of the living. Indeed,it is not too much to say that the oddest feature of the 1552 burial rite isthe disappearance of the corpse from it. So, at the moment of committalin 1552, the minister turns not towards the corpse, but away from it, tothe living congregation around the grave. “Forasmuche as it hath pleasedalmightie God of his great mercy to take unto himselfe the soule of ourdere brother here departed: we therefore commit his body to the ground,earth to earth, asshes to asshes, dust to dust.” Here the dead person isspoken not to, but about, as one no longer here, but precisely as departed:the boundaries of human community have been redrawn. (475)

It should be noted, however, that The Book of Common Prayer does offer “charita-ble prayers” for the dead, and that the Anglican liturgy has prayers for the souls


of all the faithful departed (prayers to which, as Hooker notes, the Puritansobjected).

53. Horatio’s adjuration to the Ghost uses the language that is the very core ofthe stories of ghosts who return from Purgatory. In The Renaissance “Hamlet”,Frye comments on Horatio’s words “If there be any good to be done / Thatmay to thee do ease and grace to me” (1.1.111–12): “That question goes to theheart of the sixteenth-century Roman Catholic system ofmortuary endowments,indulgences, masses and prayers, all directed to alleviating the pains of souls inpurgatory and to lessening the time which they must spend before passing onto the unmixed bliss of heaven” (22).

54. Anglican burials seemed to Nonconformists to be papist in their ceremonies.The largely Presbyterian Westminster Assembly in 1644 had replaced the Bookof Common Prayer with its Directory, where orders required that the dead be buriedpublicly, “without any Ceremony.” The Directory said that “the customes of kneel-ing down, and praying by, or towards the dead Corps, and other such usages,in the place where it lies, before it be carried to Burial, are superstitious: andfor that, praying, reading, and singing both in going to, and at the Grave, havebeen grosly abused, are no way beneficiall to the dead, and have proved manywayes hurtfull to the living, therefore let all such things be laid aside” (Directoryfor the Publique Worship of God [1644], 73–74). James Pilkington, bishop of Dur-ham from 1561 to 1576, wrote rules for funerals (published posthumously in1585) in which he insisted “that no superstition should be committed in them,wherein the papists infinitely offend; as in masses, dirges, trentals, singing, ring-ing, holy water, hallowed places, year’s days and month-minds, crosses, pardonletters to be buried with them, mourners, de profundis by every lad that couldsay it, dealing of money solemnly for the dead, watching of the corpse, bell andbanner, with many more that I could reckon” (Works, ed. James Scholefield,Parker Society, vol. 41 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1842], 1:399).Of course, wealthy and powerful Protestants were often buried with consider-able ceremony, though not with Catholic rites of passage. Thus, for example,Sir Philip Sidney’s funeral procession carried a full display of the symbols of hischivalry—shield, crest, helm, sword, spurs, and so forth—which would oncehave been presented at the offertory of a requiem mass. See J.F.R. Day, “DeathBe Very Proud: Sidney, Subversion and ElizabethanHeraldic Funerals,” in TudorPolitical Culture, ed. Dale Hoak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995),pp. 179–203, esp. p. 185.

55. It is perhaps worth noting that Laertes’ words seem to imply a passage of timebefore Ophelia’s soul reaches its destined end as a ministering angel. Of course,the time could simply be the interval before the priest himself dies and goes toHell, but there remains something odd about Laertes’ locution.

56. Thomas Watson, The Fight of Faith Crowned: or, a Sermon Preached at the funeralof that Eminently Holy man Mr. Henry Stubs (London: Joseph Coller at the Bibleon London Bridge, 1678), p. 18. I owe this reference to Sharon Achinstein,“Death and Dissent in Restoration England” (unpublished MS). Low (“Hamletand the Ghost of Purgatory,” p. 462) comparably quotes Matthew Parker at the


funeral of Martin Bucer in 1551: “Moreover, it agreeth not with the rules offaith, for a christian man to bewayle the dead. For, who can deny that to beagainst faith, which is flatly forbidden by the scriptures? And how can that besayed to agree with the rule of fayth, which the scriptures most evidentlyeproove to be done by those that have no hope?” In his Book of Discipline (1560)John Knox opposed even the funeral sermon, arguing as many reformers didthat burial was properly a civil rather than an ecclesiastical office (and pointingout that Scripture—Lev. 21:1—prohibited the presence of clergy at funerals).Knox cautions that “albeit things sung and read may admonish some of theliving to prepare themselves for death, yet shall some superstitious and ignorantpersons ever think that the works, singing, or reading of the living do and mayprofit the dead” (cited in Frederic B. Tromly, “ ‘Accordinge to sounde religion’:The Elizabethan Controversy over the Funeral Sermon,” Journal of Medieval andRenaissance Studies 13 (1983): 295). Thomas Cartwright’s similar attack—“fu-neral sermons . . . are put in the place of trentals”—is cited in David Stannard,The Puritan Way of Death (New York: 1977), p. 104.

57. Cressy notes that “[p]rayer for the dead was such a deeply engrained practicein mid-Tudor England that it took several decades of preaching and disciplineto draw it to a close” (Birth, Marriage, and Death, p. 398).

58. In Twelfth Night, which was probably written in the same year as Hamlet, thecountess Olivia has embarked on a course of obstinate and extravagant mourn-ing for her deceased brother. Feste—who elsewhere in the play takes on thepart of the curate Sir Topas, in an apparent parody of the noted Puritan exorcistJohn Darrell—undertakes a mock catechism to prove that Olivia is a fool:

FESTE. Good madonna, why mournest thou?OLIVIA. Good fool, for my brother’s death.FESTE. I think his soul is in hell, madonna.OLIVIA. I know his soul is in heaven, fool.FESTE. The more fool, madonna, to mourn for your brother’s soul, being

in heaven.(1.5.57–62)

59. The “Spiritual Testament” (both the English version of the formulary in itsentirety and the document transcribed in the eighteenth century) are printed inJames G. McManaway, “John Shakespeare’s ‘Spiritual Testament,’ ” ShakespeareQuarterly 18 (1967): 197–205. Since the original has been lost, it is not clearwhether the document was a blank form on which John Shakespeare simplyentered his name or a specially prepared local transcript. McManaway observesthat “since the poet’s father had no parents living in 1581, the earliest date thetestament might have been in distribution in England” (205), the mention ofparents in article XII may indicate a form. But “parent,” especially in the six-teenth century, could simply mean kinsman. See also John Henry de Groot, TheShakespeares and “The Old Faith” (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1946), pp. 64–110. The testmonial to the character of the workman who found the documentis cited in Samuel Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life(New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 45.


60. This implication has found support in recent biographical studies that haveexplored the network of interlinked Catholic families in Lancashire with whomone “William Shakeshafte,” possibly a young schoolmaster or player, was con-nected in the late 1570s or early 1580s.

61. On a possible link betweenHamlet andMore’s Supplication of Souls, see VittorioGabrieli’s note in Notes and Queries 26 (April 1979): 120–21. See also Robert F.Fleissner, “Hamlet and The Supplication of Souls Reconvened,” Notes and Queries32 (March 1985): 49–51.

62. Thomas More, The Apology, ed. J. B. Trapp, Yale Edition of The Complete Worksof St. Thomas More, 9:76.

63. All citations of Foxe’s account are to the introduction of Furnivall’s edi-tion of Fish’s A Supplication for the Beggars. Foxe’s mock-title is taken fromMore’s dead, who characterize themselves as “we sely poore pewlyng sowles”(136).

64. Hugh Latimer, “Sermon Preached Before the Convocation of the Clergy,” inThe Works of Hugh Latimer, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1844), 1:50.

65. Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory, or Education of an Orator, trans. John SelbyWatson, 2 vols. (London: George Bell, 1902), 2:161. See the similar warningin Puttenham’s account of “Hypotiposis, or the counterfeit representation”:“The matter and occasion leadeth vs many times to describe and set foorthmany things, in such sort as it should appeare they were truly before our eyesthough they were not present, which to do it requireth cunning: for nothingcan be kindly counterfait or represented in his absence, but by great discre-tion in the doer. And if the things we couet to describe be not naturall or notveritable, than yet the same axeth more cunning to do it, because to faine athing that neuer was nor is like to be, proceedeth of a great wit and sharperinuention than to describe things that be true.” Puttenham goes on to distin-guish between Prosopographia, which includes the feigning of “the visage, speachand countenance of any person absent or dead” and “Prosopeia, or the Count-erfait in personation [sic],” which includes giving “reason or speech to dombecreatures or other insensible things” (The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Glady DoidgeWillcock and Alice Walker [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936], pp.238–39).

66. John Foxe, “The Story of M. Symon Fish,” Appendix D in the Yale Edition ofThe Complete Works of St. Thomas More, 7:442–43.

67. John Gee, New Shreds of the Old Snare (London: Robert Mylbourne, 1624).

68. It is not clear what Gee has in mind, but Kircher’s later use of the magiclantern, discussed in chapter 3, suggests one possibility.

69. Gee provides a mock justification of the high price: the play is performed foronly a single spectator, and therefore the players “must haue as much of thatone as if they had an whole Theater full” (21). Moreover, even if there is onlyone actor onstage, there is a large staff inside the “tyring-house, that take a great

313N OT ES T O EP I LO G U E

deale of paines to proiect the plot, to instruct the Actor, and to furnish him withhabit and ornament. And who can tell how many sharers there are that musttake part of that which is paid?” (21).

EPILOGUE

1. We know that he entertained the idea of posthumous existence in his sonnets.The “living record” of his beloved, he writes in sonnet 55, will outlast marbleand the gilded monuments of princes.

’Gainst death and all oblivious enmityShall you pace forth.

Through the incantatory power of the poet’s verse, the fair young man willdefy mortality and walk the earth—pace forth—like a ghost. Though the gravecontracts the space of human existence to nothing, though oblivion is the fateof the proudest of mortals, the beloved will continue to inhabit the world:

[Y]our praise shall still find roomEven in the eyes of all posterityThat wear this world out to the ending doom.

So, till the judgement that yourself arise,You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.

The claim could scarcely be more magnificently extravagant: for the beloved,the interval between death and judgment, between the body’s dissolution andits resurrection, will not be a story of inexorable vanishing. It will instead be astory of miraculous survival: “[Y]our praise shall still find room / Even in theeyes of all posterity.”

But posterity has in fact altogether lost the youth’s identity—centuries of fe-verish effort have failed to give him a convincing local habitation and a name—and perhaps this loss is entirely appropriate. The life, the room, the dwellingthat the poet lovingly conferred upon him was always and only “in this”—thatis, in the poem. The pacing forth signifies not, it turns out, the creaking foot-steps of a ghost but the sweet cadences of a sonnet:

Not marble nor the gilded monumentsOf princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,But you shall shine more bright in these contentsThan unswept stone besmeared with sluttish time.

Swept or unswept, stones have the names of the dead indelibly carved in them—that is the whole point of using stone—but Shakespeare’s powerful rhymesname no names. We know next to nothing about the young man—sluttish timehas taken care of that—though the lines in which he is praised continue, as thepoet hoped, to possess an eerie and intense life.

2. Shakespeare seems to have had little or no interest in the kind of posthumousexistence that the cult of Purgatory and prayers for the dead had helped tofoster: the continued claims after death of particular named individuals. Longafter Purgatory had been officially labeled a fiction and prayers for the dead

314 N OT ES T O EP I LO G U E

had been outlawed, poets could continue to serve these claims. We have onlyto think of Ben Jonson’s exquisite epitaphs for his son Benjamin and his daugh-ter Mary or John Donne’s anniversary commemorations of Elizabeth Drury. ButShakespeare’s interest lay elsewhere. He seems to have written a small numberof epitaphs—for Elias James, John Combe, Edward or Thomas Stanley, and pos-sibly for his own bones—and he may have written the long, largely tedious fu-neral elegy for William Peter. But none of these modest efforts participates ina meaningful way in any cult of the dead. What shines brightest in the tracesShakespeare left behind are not the memories of the actual people amongwhom he lived—his parents, his wife, his son Hamnet, his daughters Judith andSusanna, his nameless lovers—and not even his own unchronicled identity butrather his imaginary characters. The question is what claims these unreal menand women can possibly make upon us.

I N D E X

)(

Achinstein, Sharon, 310n.56 Bernard, Saint, 292n.49Bestrafte Brudermord, Der, 206, 218Aeschylus, 153

Albertus Magnus, 107 Bible: and doctrine of Purgatory, 32,35, 49, 102, 138–40, 235; EnglishAles, 105–6, 108, 114, 117, 285n.8

Alexander VI (pope), 95, 283n.74 translation of, 10; Hebrew, 7–8, 46,113, 140Allen, Cardinal William, 13, 37

All Hallows’ Eve, 16 “Bidding Prayer,” 265n.12Binet, Etienne, 25–26All Saints’ Day, 16, 265n.13

All Souls’ Day, 16, 20, 265n.13, 294n.62 Blind Harry, 132, 292n.48body, 147–48, 160–61, 231, 243,alms, 8, 13, 19, 22, 25, 30, 60, 102, 103–

4, 130, 132, 146, 148–49, 269 291n.46; fate of, 45, 56, 115, 127,147, 180, 212, 213, 241, 243, 303n.13angels, 39, 50–51, 52, 54, 55, 57, 59,

62–64, 73, 113, 118, 145, 182, 223, Boetie, Etienne de la, 12, 264n.5Boleyn, Anne, 134233, 293n.58, 307n.37, 310n.55

anticlericalism, 10, 30, 119–22 Bologna, 105, 285n.8Bonaventure, Saint, 95anti-Semitism, 78

Antwerp, 96 Book of Common Prayer, 309n.52, 310n.54Books of Hours, 52–55, 59Apocalypse of Saint Paul, 79

Apocalypse of Saint Peter, 79 Borromeo, Carlo, 248Bosch, Hieronymus, 59, 78Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 21, 27, 144,

267n.24 Bourbon, Etienne de, 279n.30Boureau, Alain, 267n.22Aristotle, 214–16, 303–4n.15

Armagh, archbishop of, 100 Bredekamp, Horst, 300n.35Brittany, 108Arthur (king), 11, 152

Augustine, Saint, 17, 33, 68, 75, 140, Brown, Theo, 307–8n.41Bucer, Martin, 311n.56215, 267n.24, 278n.25, 286n.12

Augustinian order, 74, 81, 120 Burgess, Clive, 295n.72Burghley, William Cecil, Lord, 36Avignon, 105, 131burial practices, 18, 60, 104, 143, 145–

46, 153, 162, 196, 238, 245–47,Bacon, Francis, 227, 296n.7Bainham, James, 293n.51 266n.19, 307n.34, 309n.52, 310n.54.

See also churchyards; funerals; gravesBale, John, 13, 30–31ballads, 151–52, 195Battenhouse, Roy, 239 Caesar, Henry, 151, 295n.1, 296n.3

Caesar, Dr. Julius, 295n.1Beatific Vision, 66, 69, 121Beaulieu, Marie-Anne Polo de, 285n.8 Caesarius of Heisterbach, 142, 280n.39

Calderon de la Barca, Pedro, 76, 84Bede, Saint, 73, 74, 292n.49Belleforest, Francois de, 205, 218, 219 Cambridge, 274n.74

Camden, William, 39bell ringing, 43–44, 246, 265n.13,274n.82, 310n.54 Campion, Edmund, 95–96, 254

Carmelite order, 81Beradt, Charlotte, 165

316 I N D E X

Carthusian order, 60 Delius, Nikolaus, 302n.7Derrida, Jacques, 297n.17Cartwright, Thomas, 311n.56

Catharine of Aragon, 150 devils, 39, 52–55, 62–64, 66–67, 73, 78,80, 83, 89, 90, 93, 106, 109, 111, 113,Caxton, William, 94–95, 267n.25

Cecil, William. See Burghley, William 116, 121, 129, 130, 138, 145, 155–56,158, 161, 175–77, 182, 186, 195, 209,Cecil, Lord

cemeteries. See churchyards 220, 223, 233, 236, 251, 253,281n.53, 294 nn. 58 and 70, 308n.45censorship, 236

Cervantes, Miguel de, 282n.60 Devlin, Fr. Christopher, 239, 307n.37discretio spirituum, 103–5, 118, 121, 123,chantries, 5, 7, 21–24, 30, 34, 39, 133,

244, 247, 250, 273n.74 210, 220, 237, 245, 274n.75Dominican order, 81, 106, 144, 290n.39chantry acts (1545, 1547), 244

chantry priests, 21, 22, 24, 244 Domninus, Saint, 66–67Doncaster, Viscount, 263n.8Chaucer, Geoffrey, 267n.26

Chiffoleau, Jacques, 105, 289n.35 Donegal, high sheriff of, 100Donne, John, 8, 9, 40–46, 49, 147, 263Christina of Saint-Trond (Christina the

Astonishing), 290n.40 nn. 4 and 8, 275 nn. 83 and 88,314n.2Christmas, 120

Chrysostom, Saint John, 145, 209 dreams, 60, 77, 84–87, 91–93, 95, 96,103, 164–81, 194–95, 199, 200–217,church ornamentation, 18, 50–51, 56–

57, 69, 71; destruction of, 61 252, 260, 298n.24, 299 nn. 27 and 29,300n.31, 301n.43churchyards, 16, 18, 104, 162, 201, 235,

245–46, 265n.12, 266n.15, 275n.83. Drihthelm, 73, 74Dublin, 87See also burial practices; graves

Cistercian order, 74–76, 78, 85, 93 Duffy, Eamon, 269n.35, 309n.52Dunbar, William, 132Clogher, 95

Cluny, 265n.13 Durham, 82Durham Abbey, 18Cole, James, 272n.66

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 207Columbus, Christopher, 75 Easter, 120, 124, 292n.46

Easting, Robert, 280n.42, 281n.47Colvin, Howard, 268n.29confession, 66, 128–29, 237, 249 Edinburgh, 75

Edward IV, 137Confraternity of the Rosary, 70conjuring, 3, 128, 151, 155–56, 174, Edward VI, 244

Edward, Lord Hastings, 52192, 195, 258, 295n.1Corbett, Richard (bishop of Oxford and Elizabeth I, 245, 296 nn. 6 and 7,

307n.34, 309n.51Norwich), 35–36Cork, Earl of, 99 Elyot, George, 133

Erasmus, 141, 284n.77Coverdale, Miles, 145Cracow, 75 Eucharist, 4, 45, 58, 109, 125, 131, 240–

42. See also HostCranmer, Thomas (archbishop of Canter-bury), 145 Euripides, 153

Eusebius, 303n.9Cressy, David, 265n.13, 307n.34,311n.57 Everyman, 231

Evesham, monk of, 65–66, 74, 276n.15,cultural poetics, 5Cursor Mundi, 70, 278n.25 305n.21, 306n.32

exempla, 104, 142, 152, 274n.75exorcism, 126, 196–97Dante, 7, 49, 82, 84, 99, 273n.71

David, Gerart, of Bruges, 52–53Day of Judgment, 291n.46 fairies, 132, 159, 162–64, 196–97, 199

familial bond, 16, 23, 24, 25, 33, 72,Day of the Dead. See All Souls’ DayDekker, Thomas, 99, 284n.85 123, 124, 129–31, 137, 143, 146, 148,

317I N D E X

193, 197–99, 205–6, 213–14, 218–29, 165, 197–99; as figure of false surmise,157, 158–61, 164, 187, 199, 200; as248–49, 269n.35, 291n.45, 300n.36

Farmanagh, high sheriff of, 100 figure of history, 157, 173, 180, 184–85, 195; as figure of psychic distur-fear, 47–48, 59, 61, 68–72, 84, 88, 93,

108–10, 131–32, 151, 157, 161, 164– bance, 157, 185–87, 190–91, 193–95,199, 202, 211; as figure of theater,80, 181, 217–18, 223, 251, 279n.30,

297n.19, 298 nn. 24, 25, and 26, 157, 195–96, 200–202, 258; popularbeliefs about, 151–52, 195, 199,299n.29

Feast of the Epiphany, 120, 291n.46 289n.35; skepticism about, 201, 208;in visual art, 110–11Fineman, Joel, 5

Fish, Simon, 10–14, 23, 28–33, 133–38, Gobi, Jean, 105, 108, 114, 121, 126,142, 155, 238, 285n.9, 289n.35141, 143–45, 148–50, 244–45, 249–

50, 264n.7, 269n.34, 292n.50, Goebbels, Joseph, 299n.27Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 229293n.51; wife of, 134, 293n.51

Fisher, Philip, 304n.19 Golden Legend. See Jacobus de VoragineGoodfellow, Robin, 60, 162–63, 196Fletcher, Phineas, 270n.44

Floyd, John, 36, 275n.2 Googe, Barnabe, 24–25, 268–69n.31Grange, John, 234fornication, 120

Foxe, John, 10, 133–34, 249–52, 256, graves, 40, 43, 51, 186, 196, 209, 212,217, 226, 238, 241, 245, 259,271n.54, 292n.50, 312n.63

France, 3, 105, 132 275n.83. See also burial practices;churchyardsFranciscan order, 81

Frith, John, 32, 38–39, 49, 149–50, 251 Gray’s Inn, 10Greene, Robert, 254, 302n.2Frye, Northrop, 310n.53

Fulbecke, William, 296n.7 Greenwich, 296n.7Gregory the Great (pope), 58–59, 114,Fulke, William, 37, 273n.71

funerals, 21, 52–53, 104, 145, 162, 244– 129, 292n.49Gregory XIII (pope), 70, 268n.26,47, 274n.82, 293n.51, 309n.52,

310n.54 277n.23grief, psychology of, 102–3, 123, 220,funeral sermon, 247, 274n.82, 311n.56

229, 304n.19Grindal, Edmund, 274n.82Garber, Marjorie, 297n.16

Gascoigne, George, 158 Grunewald, Matthias, 165Gui de Corvo. See Gast of GyGast of Gy, 5, 106–33, 142, 144–46, 155,

209, 224, 225, 245, 285 nn. 9 and 10, Gurevich, Aron, 281n.51286 nn. 11, 12, and 13, 287n.30,288n.32, 289 nn. 36 and 37, 290 nn. Hades. See Hell: classical

Haigh, Christopher, 24, 269n.34,39 and 40, 291n.46, 305n.21Gee, John, 254–58, 312 nn. 68 and 69 309n.51

Hall, Edward, 176–78, 300n.31Geertz, Clifford, 5Gerald of Wales, 93 Harvey, Barbara, 269n.34

Heaney, Seamus, 84Germany, 3, 8, 27, 61, 136, 263n.8Gerson, Jean, 293n.55 Heaven, 17, 19, 25, 26, 45, 50, 61, 62,

66, 68, 73, 80–81, 85, 96, 111, 113,Gervase of Tilbury, 286n.16ghosts, 4, 40–42, 44–45, 102–33, 141– 121, 138, 141, 144, 210, 231, 246,

250, 269n.36, 270n.44, 272n.66,47, 151–65, 170–204, 205–13, 216–30, 232–45, 248, 252–53, 255–57, 273n.71, 274n.82, 282n.62, 284n.1,

288n.32, 289n.34, 292n.46, 303n.12,283n.68, 289n.34, 291n.46, 292n.49,296 nn. 5, 6, and 12, 301n.42, 310n.53, 311n.58

Hell, 4, 7, 17, 19, 23, 25, 43, 50–52, 54,303n.11; appearing in the day, 114–15; appearing only at night, 162–63, 56, 59, 61–62, 66, 73, 78–80, 85–86,

96, 98, 99, 111, 113, 116, 123, 138,274n.77, 284n.1, 115; classical, 152,

318 I N D E X

Hell (cont.) Ireland, 3, 74–78, 87, 93, 284n.89Irish, 61, 76, 99141, 151, 157, 221, 233, 237–40, 250,

266n.17, 273n.71, 274n.82, 279n.35,281n.53, 282n.62, 288n.32, 289n.34, “Jacke Upland,” 27–28

Jacobus de Voragine, 19–20291n.44, 292n.49, 294n.70, 310n.55,311n.58; classical, 152, 156, 157, 170– James V, 132

James VI and I, 24571, 195, 240; pains of, 52–53, 62, 64,67, 186, 230, 279n.29 James of Vitry, 20

Jamyns, Amadis, 284n.1Henry V, 136, 268n.27Henry VII, 22–24 Jenkins, Harold, 303n.12

Jews, 7–9, 98, 122, 165–66, 192, 263n.7,Henry VIII, 10, 23, 30, 133, 144, 149–50, 244 299n.27. See also Judaism

Joachimus Vadianus, 95Herodotus, 87Heywood, Jasper, 152, 296 nn. 6 and 12 John, Saint, 83

John IV (pope), 16Hibbard, G. R., 242, 303n.12Higden, Ranulph, 283n.75 John XII (pope), 235

John XXII (pope), 105, 290n.39Hilarie, Hughe, 267–68n.26Himmelfarb, Martha, 278n.24 John of Trevisa, 283n.75

Jonah, 238History . . . of Doctor John Faustus,155–56 Jones, Henry, 71, 95, 270n.44, 278–

79n.28, 281n.47, 287n.28Hitler, Adolf, 299n.27Hobbes, Thomas, 133, 292n.49 Jonson, Ben, 154, 163, 296n.12, 314n.2

Joseph, Miriam, 239Hoby, Sir Edward, 36–37, 272n.68,275n.2 Judaism, 7–9, 79, 263 nn. 6 and 8, 277–

78n.24. See also Bible: Hebrew; JewsHoccleve, Thomas, 267n.24H. of Sawtry, 74–75, 82, 84–86, 91, Julian, Saint, 66–67

280n.38Holbein, Hans, the Younger, 57 kaddish, 6–9

Kafka, Franz, 169Holinshed, Raphael, 76, 93, 283n.71Holy Land, 81 Kelly, H. A., 288n.32

Kircher, Athanasius, 91–92, 283n.68,Homer, 98Hooker, 310n.52 312n.68

Kirchmeyer, Thomas. See Naogeorgus,Horsey, William, 271n.54hospitals, 22, 39, 60, 273n.74 Thomas

Knevet, Ralph, 99, 236Host, 58–59, 109, 121, 125–26, 240,242, 244, 287n.20, 306n.33. See also Knox, John, 311n.56

Kosselleck, Reinhart, 166, 175, 298n.24EucharistHudson, Anne, 264n.7 Krantzius, Abertus, 95

Kyd, Thomas, 152, 248, 256Hughes, Thomas, 152, 296n.7Huguenots, 264n.5Hunne, Richard, 32, 136, 271n.54 Lactantius, 275n.88

Lancashire, 254, 312n.60Huntingdonshire, 74Langland, William, 27Last Judgment (mystery play), 230ideology, 45–46

imagination, 47–50, 56–57, 74, 85–87, Latimer, Hugh, 32, 34–35, 49, 250Lawes, Henry, 273n.71148, 151, 161, 164, 174, 176, 183,

193, 252, 253, 258, 273n.71, 282n.67, Lay Folks Mass Book, 14Lazarus, 43, 44283n.68, 297n.19

indulgences, 5, 15, 19, 28, 31, 49, 70, Le Goff, Jacques, 13, 144, 265n.11,270n.45, 280n.43, 282nn. 61 and 62,139, 235, 250, 258, 261, 290n.40,

310n.53 294n.60

319I N D E X

Le Loyer, Pierre, 212, 297n.19 21, 39, 109, 116, 120, 124, 133, 225,246, 293n.56, 310n.54Lilleshall, Shropshire, 16

mass books, 14, 57Limbo (of infants), 289n.34mass pennies, 148limbo patrum, 35, 37Matsuda, Takami, 276n.6, 278n.27Locrine, 152Meir of Rothenburg, 277n.24Lodge, Thomas, 205Meister des Palant-Alters, 275n.3Lollards, 13, 27, 72, 264n.7Memorbucher, 8London, 9, 10, 229, 271n.54memory, 17, 19, 42, 102, 131, 143–44,Lostwithiel, Cornwall, 151

146, 148, 150, 180, 204–8, 212–18,Lough Derg, Donegal, 75–76, 93–96,228–29, 237, 239, 241, 249, 304n.17,99–101, 281n.52, 283n.69. See also305n.23; classical theories of, 214–16;Saint Patrick’s Purgatoryand forgetting, 218–22, 224–27, 232,Low, Anthony, 305n.23249, 252, 305n.23Lucian, 142

Meulan-sur-Seine, 266n.19Luther, Martin, 10, 33–35, 136, 140,Mildmay, Sir Walter, 151, 295n.1234, 241, 271n.57Milton, John, 38, 273n.71Lydgate, John, 19, 267n.21Milward, Peter, 239Lyndsay, David, 132Minorite order, 120mirabilia, 104, 274n.75Machiavelli, Niccolo, 178–79miracula, 104, 274n.75McKellen, Ian, 167Mirk, John, 16, 83, 265n.13, 294n.62,McManaway, James G., 311n.59

306n.33Madrid, 75Mirror for Magistrates, 296n.5

magic lantern, 87, 91–92, 283n.68,Misfortunes of Arthur, 152

312n.68Moddys, Edmund, 133

Mandeville, John de, 75, 122Molinet, Jean, 293n.57

Mannini, Antonio, 282n.59 Montague, Lady Mary Wortley, 217Marc’hadour, Germain, 271n.51, Montaigne, Michel de, 12

293n.55, 294n.59 Moorman, F. W., 296n.11, 297n.16Marcus, Brother. See Vision of Tondal More, John, 293n.56Margaret of York, duchess of Burgundy, More, Saint Thomas, 32, 38–39, 134,

62, 132 141–42, 149, 250, 254, 271n.54,Marie de France, 84, 280–81n.46 293n.51; Supplication of Souls, 5, 134–Marlowe, Christopher, 154–56, 163, 50, 151, 204, 218, 228–29, 244–45,

294n.70; Doctor Faustus, 155–56, 158, 249, 250–51, 253, 256, 277n.21, 293236, 258–59; Jew of Malta, 154–55, nn. 55, 57, and 58, 294 nn. 59 and 71,178–79 299n.28, 312 nn. 61 and 63; Utopia,

Marmion, Simon, 62–64, 110 134–35, 250–51, 293n.52Marston, John, 153 mortmain, 30–31Marx, Karl, 297n.17 “mortuary” gift, 32Mary, Virgin, 57–58, 116, 128–29, 248 Mumford, James, 68–69, 82, 266–Mary Tudor, 36, 244 67n.20, 277n.21Maskell, William, 18mass, 14, 17, 19, 22–25, 27, 41, 51, 54, Naogeorgus, Thomas, 269n.31

59–60, 102–4, 109, 114, 116, 120, Naples, 58123–25, 134, 137, 145, 148, 224, 242, narrative, 87–88, 90–91, 105, 191, 228,248–50, 268n.26, 269n.34, 272n.65, 282 nn. 62 and 67, 283n.68274n.82, 279n.33, 291 nn. 44 and 46, Nashe, Thomas, 152, 205, 302n.2293n.56, 294n.62, 305n.23, 310 nn. Nazis, 165–67, 169, 179, 298 nn. 24, 25,

and 26, 299n.2753 and 54; Mystic, 58–59; requiem, 5,

320 I N D E X

necromancy. See conjuring 303n.11, 305n.23, 306 nn. 28 and 32,310n.53, 313n.2; basis for in scripture,Netherlands, 263n.8

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 179 32, 35, 49, 102, 138–40, 235; double,114–16, 118, 145, 288n.32; eyewitnessNorthumberland, 78, 81

Notre-Dame, 70 accounts of, 61–65, 73–83, 95, 121,279n.36; location of, 115–16; pains of,20–21, 28, 34, 53–54, 62, 65–66, 68–obits, 39

Office of the Dead, 124. See also mass: re- 70, 71, 72, 79–83, 89, 91–92, 111–12,117, 119, 123, 127, 136–37, 140–42,quiem

Oldcastle, Sir John, 72, 136 147–49, 186, 230–31, 267n.24,276n.6, 279n.29, 295n.73; poetics of,Outreman, Philippe d’, 279n.33

Owayne Miles, 73, 75–82, 86–91, 116, 3, 4, 33, 35–39, 45–47, 49–50, 61, 85,149, 161, 234, 250–52; popular beliefs280n.42, 281n.53

Owen, Jane, 25–26, 71–72, 279 nn. 35 about, 14–16, 94, 102, 269n.34; Prot-estant denial of, 10–13, 23–40, 45–47,and 36

49, 60–61, 133–35, 145, 158, 164,244, 250, 271n.58, 271n.66, 307n.41;Paris, Matthew, 280n.38, 281n.52

Parker, Matthew, 310n.56 skepticism about, 73–78, 111, 115–17;in visual art, 50–64, 91–92Parliament, 29, 136, 284n.89

Patrick, Saint, 75–77, 86–87, 95, 100, The Puritan: or, the Widow of Watling Street,157–58, 240199, 233–34, 235, 237. See also Saint

Patrick’s PurgatoryPeele, Thomas, 152 Queen’s College, Oxford, 122

Quintilian, 251Pennotus, Gabriel, 93Perez de Montalban, 84Peter the Chanter, 20 Rastell, John, 294n.59

“Relief of Souls in Purgatory,” 60Philip the Fair, 52, 54Pico della Mirandola, 142 representation, 18, 51, 57, 59, 69, 91,

156, 159, 256, 258, 276n.11, 312n.65pilgrimage, 81, 84, 93–97, 145, 272n.65Pilkington, James, 274n.82, 310n.54 revenge, 152–54, 180, 184, 191, 199,

205–8, 218–21, 224–25, 227, 229,Plato, 5, 46, 214–15Plutarch, 98, 182 237, 239–40, 244, 252–53, 304n.20,

305n.23, 306n.28Pole, Cardinal: specter of, 151, 295n.1Ponticus Virumnius, 95 Reynolds, Walter, 105

Richard III, 22, 268n.27pope, 19, 26–29, 32–33, 52, 60, 81, 121,236, 268n.26, 272n.65 Ripelin, Hugh, 294n.70

Robinson, George, 133prayer for the dead. See suffragesPricke, Robert, 272n.66 Rochester, bishop of, 38–39

Rogers, Thomas, 235prosopopoeia, 250–51, 312n.65Prosser, Eleanor, 239, 303n.12 Rolle, Richard, 71, 279n.29, 288n.32,

295n.73Proust, Marcel, 87, 91Puttenham, George, 312n.65 Rome, 75

Roo, Mr., 10Pvrgatories Trivmph Over Hell, 272–73n.68Purgatory, 17–19, 22, 41–43, 84, 90, 93, Rosse, Jean de (canon of Hereford), 105

Rowse, A. L., 295n.1103, 105, 113, 122, 124–25, 129, 131–32, 143–44, 152–53, 156, 187, 195,199, 204, 223, 225, 229–40, 246–47, Saint Patrick’s Purgatory, 4–5, 73–101,

111, 234, 280n.39, 283 nn. 71, 74,249, 253–58, 261, 265 nn. 11 and 12,268n.26, 269 nn. 35 and 36, 270n.44, and 75, 284n.85

Saint Patrick’s Purgatory. See Tractatus San-272n.65, 273n.71, 278 nn. 25 and 27,279n.33, 289n.34, 291n.44, 292n.49, cti Patricii

Saint Paul’s, 8, 44294 nn. 58, 59, and 62, 299n.29,

321I N D E X

Saint Peter’s, 19 Sidney, Sir Philip, 310n.54Sandys, Edwin, 272n.66 Silo, Master, 20–21, 267n.25Santa Scala, 33 simony, 120–22Saracens, 122 “sin offering,” 139Sarum Horae, 16 Sixtus V (pope), 70Sarum Prymer, 16 Slack, Paul, 264n.2, 295n.75Saul, 155 Spottiswoode, James (bishop ofSavonarola, 142 Clogher), 100Saxo Grammaticus, 205–6, 218, 219 sodomy, 120, 122Scaramella, Pierroberto, 268n.26 “soul cakes,” 16, 265n.13Scarisbrick, J. J., 273–74n.74 South English Legendary, 77, 267–70n.26,Scarry, Elaine, 87, 282n.67, 283n.68 270n.37, 283n.69Schmitt, Jean-Claude, 104, 143, 245, Speculum Sacerdotale, 294n.62

274n.76 Stanihurst, Richard, 96–97Scot, Reginald, 3, 195–96 Stephen of Bourbon, 20, 144Scotland, 132 Stratford-upon-Avon, 248, 254Segneri, Paolo, the Elder, 277n.18 suffrages, 14–34, 39, 41, 45, 50–51, 56,Semper, I. J., 308n.44 59, 102–4, 110, 116, 120, 122–25,Seneca, 152–53, 180, 184, 205–6, 224– 129, 131, 133, 137, 143–44, 148, 195,

25, 237, 248, 253, 296n.12, 302n.2 209–10, 235, 244, 246–47, 249, 258,Shakespeare, Hamnet, 248 260–61, 265n.12, 274n.74, 283n.75,Shakespeare, John, 248–49, 311n.59 291 nn. 44 and 46, 294n.62, 305n.23,Shakespeare, William, 3, 4, 156–58, 163, 307n.41, 310n.53

173, 195, 200, 205, 258, 299n.29, Sullivan, Henry W., 278n.27, 282n.60,302n.2, 308n.41, 313n.2; and Catholi- 283n.74cism, 248–49, 254, 312n.60. Works: Supplication for the Beggars. See Fish,Antony and Cleopatra, 298n.21, 300– Simon1n.42; Comedy of Errors, 159–61, 185, Supplication of Souls. See More, Saint187, 200; Cymbeline, 196–99; Hamlet, Thomas3–5, 51, 117, 143, 154, 157–58, 204–57, 260, 275n.4, 287n.30, 297 nn. 13

Tacitus, 48and 17, 302 nn. 7 and 8, 303n.12, 304Taillepied, Noel, 98, 266n.19, 274n.77,nn. 17, 18, and 20, 305 nn. 23 and 25,

289n.34, 291n.45306n.34, 307n.37, 308 nn. 44, 45, andTalmud, 277n.2447, 310 nn. 53 and 55, 312n.61; 1Tarlton’s News Out of Purgatory, 236, 240Henry IV, 72, 279n.35; Henry V, 21–22,Tnugdal. See Vision of Tondal258, 268n.28; 3 Henry VI (Richard DukeTolstoy, Leo, 91of York), 173; Julius Caesar, 164, 180–Tondal. See Vision of Tondal85, 200, 217–18, 235, 298n.21; KingTractatus Sancti Patricii, 73–76, 82, 84–Lear, 3, 185–87, 194, 200, 235; Mac-

86, 199, 276n.15, 282 nn. 59 and 62beth, 3, 187–95, 200, 300n.36; Midsum-Treatise of the Manner and Mede of the Mass,mer Night’s Dream, 50, 86, 161–64, 196,

17256; Othello, 234; Richard III, 164–80,Trental of Saint Gregory, 129200, 216–17, 299n.28, 300n.31; son-trentals, 5, 21, 27, 34, 39, 129, 236,nets, 313n.1; Tempest, 258–61; Twelfth

268n.26, 274n.82, 291n.44, 293n.56,Night, 160–61, 185, 187, 234, 247,310n.54298n.22, 311n.58; Winter’s Tale, 200–

Trophonius, cave of, 97, 98, 234,204, 301 nn. 43 and 44283n.72Shapiro, James, 263n.7

True Tragedy of Richard III, 177–78sheol, 7Tschischwitz, Benno, 234Shuger, Debora, 271n.57

Sicily, 15, 57 Tuke, Thomas, 70

322 I N D E X

Tyndale, William, 10, 13, 31–33, 35, 49, Werner von Palant, 51West, Robert, 308n.4760, 308n.41Westminster Abbey, 22, 25, 268n.27,

269n.34, 300n.35ur-Hamlet, 205–6, 302n.2usury, 72, 79 Westminster Assembly, 310n.54

White, Thomas, 230Wieseltier, Leon, 9Vega, Lope de, 84

Venice, 59 Wilcox, Thomas, 36, 271n.59, 273n.71William of Auvergne, 306n.32Veron, John, 36, 60–61, 97, 98–99,

272n.67 William of Stranton, 82–83, 281n.55,282n.59Vico, Giambattista, 47–49, 59, 74

Vincentius Belluacensis, 95 wills, 15, 22, 23, 25, 137, 147, 269n.34witchcraft, 3, 101, 159, 191–97, 199, 255Virgil, 98, 275n.88, 298n.26, 301n.42

Vision of Tondal, 61–64, 73, 74, 110, 113, Wolsey, Cardinal Thomas, 10Worcestershire, 265n.13276n.15

Visio Thurkilli, 66–67, 276–77n.15 Worde, Wynkyn de, 265n.12Worms, Diet of, 241Wycliffe, John, 26Walton, Izaak, 44

Warburton, William, 234Warning for Fair Women, 153 Yom Kippur, 8Waterford, 94Watkins, Carl, 276n.11 Ziegfield Follies, 6

Zumthor, Paul, 282n.66Wedderburn, John, 26

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